MammalWeb in schools projects

Connecting schools to nature in North-East England

Launched in January 2022, the ‘Connecting schools to nature in North-East England’ project worked with 72 schools and early-career ecologists across the North-East to help inspire both teachers and pupils to engage with the natural world and transform their school grounds into wildlife-friendly havens. Funded by the Green Recovery Challange Fund, MammalWeb was a lead partner in the project along with the British Ecological Society and SMASH-UK. The project reached over 5,000 pupils through a combination of outdoor workshops, teacher training events, and the delivery of a new digital platform “BES Encounters”. As part of the project, schools were given a camera trap to monitor their school grounds and took part in different citizen science initiatives including contributing data to MammalWeb and iNaturalist. Click on the image below to read the evaluation report from the project.

Schools impact study

During 2019, we worked with over 50 primary schools throughout the North East of England. This is part of project looking at whether being involved in the MammalWeb project has a positive impact on teachers, school pupils, and their parents. We looked at two different measures of impact:

1) Knowledge of UK mammals.

2) An individual's connection to nature.

Schools in the project were lent a camera trap to use on their school grounds for one month. They also had either a training session for teachers, or a workshop for school pupils. In these sessions, we told them more about how and why we use camera traps, and the species we capture on them. We assessed what impact being involved in the MammalWeb project has on participants by using short, simple questionnaires. We're currently writing these results up to be published.

The Hancock Museum project

The iconic Diplodocus cast, 'Dippy', that once stood in the Hintze hall of the Natural History Museum in London, is currently on tour! Dippy has already visited Dorset, Birmingham and Belfast, and is currently at the Hancock Museum in Newcastle from the 18/05/2019 to the 06/10/2019. You can read more about 'Dippy on tour' here. As well as educating the general public about extinct wildlife, Dippy on tour also aims to educate and engage people with extant wildlife. As such, we've been working with the Hancock museum on a project where 50 schools across Newcastle, County Durham and Northumberland, have been given a camera trap to see what wildlife is in and around their school grounds. The schools involved are in a range of different habitats including upland, lowland, coastal, woodland and urban, and have been capturing some interesting and varied wildlife! The photos captured by the schools have been uploaded to MammalWeb and displayed on screens around the Natural Northumbria exhibit at the museum. There is an area for each of the five habitats listed previously, and members of the public are invited to help classify the photos captured when they visit museum. You can also classify photos from the project from our website by clicking on the link below.

Belmont Community School

Our work engaging schools with MammalWeb started back in 2015, when PhD student Pen Yuan-Hsing worked with students at Belmont Community School in County Durham. To read an overview of the work done by Pen, with students at Belmont Community School, please click the picture below. To read the final published paper on this work, click here.