Animals and plants on the Internet, ten years of waarneming.nl

This video is called How can I enter an observation in Observado.org?

The Dutch website waarneming.nl started ten years ago; first for observations of birds, soon for other wildlife in the Netherlands as well. Later, they also started the site observado.org for all other countries.

Translated from Dutch Vroege Vogels radio:

Sunday, June 8th, 2014 09:09

Buteo buteo, the buzzard, is the bird species with the highest numbers on the site waarneming.nl. The raptor was reported about over the past ten years more than 476 thousand times. … In second place is the great egret, with more than 284 thousand observations. A notable third is the gray lag goose, counted more than 237 thousand times. Waarneming.nl has existed today for exactly 10 years.

The past decade there were more than 26 million messages on the nature site. The platform began as an initiative of a number of IT professionals with a love for nature and grew into the largest website for nature observations in the Netherlands.

Birds are by far the most often reported about: a total of over 19 million messages. Then follow the plants with more than 2.6 million messages and over one million butterflies. If you let the birds out of consideration then the roe deer is the most observed species, more than 93 thousand observations. Second is the small tortoiseshell butterfly (a little under 89 thousand) and third the common pipistrelle bat (over 88 thousand).

Through waarneming.nl people have also discovered numerous new species for the Netherlands in recent years. For example, in July 2010 in the railway yard in Rotterdam for the first time a slender blue-winged grasshopper was seen in the Netherlands. And in a garden in Montfoort in Utrecht province Montfoort in 2013, a common grass yellow butterfly was discovered. This butterfly is not from Europe but from Asia or Africa. The butterfly had never been reported before in the Netherlands.

That birds like buzzards and great egrets get most postings on the site does not mean they are the most common species. They are not. However, many people don’t post about more common bird species like blackbirds or house sparrows; mammals like brown rats; flowers like daisies, etc., if they see them.