Carriageway Park - Tuthangga

As part of our project Activating Citizen Scientists, engaging older Australians through citizen science and supported by the Department of Health, we held our first excursion in Carriageway Park. Carriageway Park is bounded by Greenhill Road, Beaumont Road, South Terrace and Hutt Road. The park features a carriageway of historic elm trees, dating from the 1870's, that form a gentle arc through the centre of the Park. As a 'Trees for Life' bush care site the park is re-vegetated with extensive native grass. The park has been given the name Tuthangga in the local Kaurna language.

Surprisingly although the park is well-traversed and close to the city there is little biodiversity information recorded iNaturalist with only 31 observations of 22 species. These observations were made by only 7 observers, I suggested a challenge to the group of at least doubling the data. The group agreed to the plan and we set about investigating the park. This was the group's first field test so it was great to have something achievable.

The group spent an hour casually investigating the biodiversity of the park. I noted that many

participants were actually surprised that once you slowed down and noticed the world around them, many species they had not noticed before stood out. In the single hour, we all found out many things about one another and tripled the observations and species recorded within the park. Not bad for a first outing! and you can check out all the observations on the project page here.

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Post-event Carriageway Park - Tuthangga iNaturalist statistics

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I was also very pleased to see several observations made over the weekend including this fantastic observation of a Far Eastern Curlew Numenius madagascariensis a great shot by Ian Forsyth AKA fossil1513!