MammalWeb in schools projects
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.

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.


Schools impact study
During 2019, we are working 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'll be looking at two different measures of impact:
1) Knowledge of UK mammals.
2) An individual's connection to nature.
Schools in the project are being lent a camera trap to use on their school grounds for one month. They also have either a training session for teachers, or a workshop for school pupils. In these sessions, we tell them more about how and why we use camera traps, and the species we capture on them. We will be assessing what impact being involved in the MammalWeb project has on participants by using short, simple questionnaires.
