Become a Citizen Scientist! Explore, Photograph, and Protect Crop Wild Relatives
Do you have a passion for botany, agriculture, or nature conservation? We are looking for volunteers to help us track Crop Wild Relatives (CWRs) across Europe. These wild cousins of our food crops hold the genetic secrets to making agriculture more resilient.
Whether you are hiking in the mountains or strolling through a city park, CWRs are all around you, growing in fields, forests, and along paths.
How to participate
1. Create a free iNaturalist account (https://www.inaturalist.org) and join the COUSIN project participatory Monitoring (Crop Wild Relatives participatory monitoring · iNaturalist)
2. Photograph the plant you wish to document.
Include:
- The whole plant
- Leaves
- Flowers or fruits (if available)
- Habitat context
3. Upload it to our dedicated project on iNaturalist.
The app’s community and AI will help you identify the species, and your data will directly contribute to vital scientific research.
Let’s map the biodiversity of our future together! You will help document species distributions, allowing your findings to be shared with a large community and helping expand collective knowledge.
iNaturalist is an online citizen-science platform for recording and sharing nature observations. Once registered, users can upload photographs of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms, helping to build a global biodiversity database.
Observations are reviewed by a large community of naturalists, scientists, and experts who help identify species. The data collected contributes to scientific research, conservation planning, and biodiversity monitoring worldwide.