Community Conservation
Want to help save the planet? You can create change right in your own backyard, right now. Here are a few ways you can be a part of the solution and conserve native animals and habitats at home, in your neighborhood, and throughout your community. Let’s go!
Self-guided Science
Share bird sightings on eBird, a global platform that provides helpful visualizations for bird identification and distribution. Look up Santa Barbara Zoo’s eBird “hotspot” to see what birds have been observed at the Zoo recently and over the course of the year.
During your Zoo visit, or visits to other sites, use the eBird mobile app to submit observations of birds you encounter. Your data contributes to a growing high-resolution data set that tells us bird population and distribution trends.
Use your smartphone as a tool for science! By taking photos and uploading them to the iNaturalist app, people of all ages and abilities can record a wealth of information about nature and learn more about it in the process. As the database grows, volunteers are producing a living record of life on Earth that scientists and land managers can use to monitor changes in biodiversity.
Learn more about iNaturalist for Southern California.
Community Science
Frogs and toads play an important role as both prey and predator in wetland ecosystems and are considered indicators of the health of their environments. However, many previously abundant frog and toad populations have declined dramatically in the United States and around the world.
The Santa Barbara Zoo is part of FrogWatch USA, a national community science effort to identify and count frogs and toads. You can directly contribute to their conservation by becoming a certified FrogWatch volunteer. Learn more about FrogWatch here.
Monarch butterfly populations have declined more than 95% since the 1980s. You can help by joining the local Western Monarch Count at Ellwood Mesa and other nearby locations; documentation helps us understand these trends and what we can do about them.
Depending on where you live in California, you can also help by either planting native nectar plants or planting locally native milkweed, which Monarch caterpillars rely on to turn into butterflies.
Bumblebees are essential pollinators in agriculture and wildlands, but many species are suffering alarming population declines and we lack data on their distribution and trends that aid conservation efforts.
The Xerces Society’s nationwide Bumble Bee Watch project helps scientists determine the range of each bumblebee species, a first step in understanding how we can help this critical pollinator throughout the country. Participation is as simple as signing up and uploading photos of bumblebees.
The National Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count is one of the longest-running science projects involving community-collected data. For over 120 years, birdwatchers have gathered to count birds within two weeks of Christmas day.
Each count is performed within a 15-mile (24-kilometer) diameter circle, and you can add to a century of community science by signing up for a count near you.