The Urban Wildlife Challenge Team is focused on expanding knowledge and awareness of the nature and biodiversity found in cities and towns; living in London means we often see the skyscrapers and congestion, and miss the mosses, bees, and birds! Previous incarnations of the team have focused primarily on educating younger children through school visits, and while we wanted to retain the core of the team, this year we also wanted to push ourselves to reach new audiences, particularly adults. This new goal developed into four key components within our program, each targeting a different sector of the community in and around London.
During our first foray into engaging adults on the topic of urban wildlife, we attracted more than 200 visitors to our booth at the Imperial Lates: Future Cities event in March, providing adults interested in adding a little green to their lives with a seed bomb for their window box planter and plant care facts, and debuting our Scurry! Through the City board game.
We also had a stall at the Great Exhibition Road Festival in June (with over a thousand attendees) where we introduced nature to the public through activities such as microscopy, a scavenger hunt, and seed bomb making. This we followed up with two school visits targeting 60 students in South London to encourage the pupils to find the wildlife around them in a nearby park and learn the basics of ecology through looking for insects and birds and identifying trees. Our board game also came with us to Bugs, Birds and Beasts Day at the Department Life Science's Silwood Campus in July, where it was played by over 300 attendees, and acquired by the Berks Bucks & Oxon Wildlife Trust for use in their educational programs. Scurry! Has also featured at the Grantham Institute's Sustainability Games Night and will also be available at the next games session run by Imperial's Sustainability Engagement team.
Our outreach activities also engaged residents in the local area through a collaboration with South Ken ZEN+. Here we developed a pilot program with the Knightsbridge Association, creating a decision tree to help people overcome obstacles they encounter when planting native pollinators in window boxes and balconies. We are proud to say that the decision tree (see images below) is now available via the SKZ website., and given the success of the pilot program, it is now being picked up and used by Westminster City Council and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, expanding the reach of Urban Wildlife even further. We hope to continue creating resources that people can use to learn about and improve urban biodiversity in their lives, including making our boardgame more widely available through an interactive webpage, and expanding our decision tree to include community gardens and larger plots of land. So, watch this space!
Team Members
Agnieszka Szwarczynska (cohort 10)
Alina Yang (cohort 11)
Catalina Cruanas Paniker (cohort 10)
Cecilia Lee-Grant (cohort 10)
Daniel Bartley (cohort 11)
Isabelle Thomson (cohort 10)
Jonathan Duke (cohort 11)
Koh Kawaguchi (cohort 11)
Nathan Clark (cohort 11)
Shyam Sharma (cohort 11)
Wanjing Yang (cohort 11)