Big Butterfly Month: India 2020 Activities, contests include big butterfly count, butterfly online workshops, butterfly photography, butterfly journaling, butterfly videography, butterfly lifecycle
PANAJI
Butterfly experts, enthusiasts and organisations in the State and across India will join hands for a month-long event, the ‘Big Butterfly Month: India 2020’, reported to be the first of its kind in the country.
Various activities such as Big Butterfly Count, Butterfly Online Workshops and contests on Butterfly Photography, Butterfly Journaling, Butterfly Videography, and Butterfly Lifecycle, will be conducted from September 5 to 20.
This year, the Big Butterfly Count would be held on an all-India level from September 14-20, where all participants would be encouraged to log in their submissions into citizen science digital platforms: Butterflies of India, iNaturalist, and India Biodiversity Portal.
The celebration would also include competitions and outreach programmes through the virtual media educating and sensitising people about butterflies. Such programmes will be conducted in most of the States, including Goa.
During The Big Butterfly Month, participants would be encouraged to collect data in their backyard of the species of butterflies that are seen.
Over 30 organisations across the country working in the field of biodiversity and its conservation have come together towards the common goal of involving citizens in large scale monitoring programmes.
In Goa, the co-ordinating organisation, Foundation for Environment Research & Conservation (FERC), is an NGO working in the field of nature conservation.
One of the objectives of the organisation is to motivate youth towards bringing about a change for a sustainable society and fostering an informed society that gives importance to knowledge-based decision making.
The Foundation runs a monthly lecture series titles Kasturi: Spreading the fragrance of knowledge, wherein experts from diverse fields are invited to talk to students and community on the first Wednesday of every month at MES College, Zuarinagar.
The Foundation has also set-up a butterfly garden in the MES College campus.
“Butterflies play a vital role in the ecosystem. They act as a food source for various other organisms such as spiders, wasps, dragonflies, birds and lizards. They also help in plant pollination and, importantly for us, act as very good indicators of the health of the environment and ecosystems. So, studying butterflies is imperative to understand our surroundings,” said FERC President Parag Rangnekar.
“The aim of the Big Butterfly Month: India 2020 is to bring citizens of the country together under one umbrella to promote observation of butterflies in the field, which will give us an indication of their abundance and seasonality.”
“In the process, appreciation for not only butterflies but our native biodiversity will be developed, which is very much needed.”
“The popularity and scope of citizen science appears almost limitless. For citizens, the motivation is to contribute to science, public information and conservation with their strength in numbers, unmatched enthusiasm and a broad geographic spread,” added Rangnekar.
