Another NfN milestone
Half a million? Five hundred thousand? 500K?
Either way it’s an impressive amount of effort from an amazing group of volunteers. Yesterday NfN reached another incredible milestone; 500,000 transcriptions have now been completed since we launched our second version of the platform. Let’s break this down a bit. If the average transcription takes 3 minutes then we have spent 25,000 hours unlocking these important biodiversity resources.
The NfN team is thrilled with the progress that we have been making and as many of you know all our data is slowly making it’s way to open access data portals like SERNEC and iDigBio among others. These data are already being utilized by researchers, conservation organizations and policy makers. We are also very interested in the benefits that our volunteers get from being involved. For example, we often hear from volunteers who tell us how NfN gives them a much-anticipated break from the stresses of their work or how NfN has encouraged them to get involved with one of their local museums. We also hear of volunteers who have taken some of the knowledge they have learned through the expeditions and gotten outside to experience biodiversity in their local area.
It’s been a wonderful journey and we are looking forward to many future milestones!
— The NfN Team
3 responses to “Another NfN milestone”
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- - June 16, 2018
Notes from Nature 
This is indeed a wonderful milestone, congrats everyone 🙂
I looked at some of your current and finished expeditions and it is intriguing to see how wide a variety of projects you have going on all the time. I never got the chance to participate in transcribing information about “medicinal plants used in India”, “mints of Florida” or the different expeditions of berries, but they all seem like interesting.
I see that you currently have an active expedition about comfort food relatives. That made me wonder if there are perhaps more expeditions coming on where the focus is edible plants or drinks such as coffee or tea? I know that the climate change affects, among other things, the ability to grow coffee and I was wondering if an expedition of some kind could help the scientists see what they can do about it? (I am a tea drinker myself, which is why I would love to learn more about tea by taking part in an expedition about them. Or of cocoa!)
Or how about an expedition of plants, herbs, berries, etc. that can be used in cosmetics? Natural cosmetics (such as Lush’s products <3) are getting very popular.
Thank you for your hard work – it is the key to having engaged volunteers 🙂
Thanks so much and we love these ideas! We don’t have any specific plans for those at this very moment, but we’ll try to keep more food plants coming.