The Urban Naturalist with Menno Schilthuizen

How Community Science is Coming Full-Circle.

Two centuries ago, in the first half of the nineteenth century, every scientist was a citizen scientist. Then came professionalization, and “amateur” became a dirty word. But now, in the twenty-first century, thanks to the open science revolution, science is back to square one, and everyone—in garden sheds, at kitchen tables, and in the backyard—can once again fully participate in the scientific world.

In his lecture The Urban Naturalist, Menno Schilthuizen takes you on a journey of discovery with a new generation of citizen scientists who, armed with apps, smartphones, mini-microscopes, and even homemade DNA labs, view urban nature with fresh eyes and make groundbreaking discoveries. These are people who are rediscovering the romance of the 19th century naturalist and distil new values and meaning from it.

With: Menno Schilthuizen.

Menno Schilthuizen (1965) is a professor of evolution and biodiversity at Leiden University and a senior researcher at the National Natural History Museum 'Naturalis' in Leiden, the Netherlands. His scientific research has involved a variety of subjects, such as the evolution of snail shells, beetle penises, insect feeding on invasive plants, and the biodiversity of caves and limestone hills. This has taken him to lots of places, from the mountains of Crete (where he did his PhD), caves in Montenegro and the heart of the rainforest of Borneo (where he worked for six year), to city parks in the Netherlands.

Besides his academic work, he has always been active as a science communicator, writing books and articles for the general public, and giving lectures. Some of his more notable appearances are his TED and TED-Ed lectures, and his appearance with Isabella Rossellini at the New York Public Library. His latest book, The Urban Naturalist, encourages everybody to become a community scientist and begin exploring the flora and fauna of our cities as the exciting, new man-made ecosystem that it is.

More recently, Schilthuizen has taken his science communication one step further and through his company Taxon Expeditions now organizes real scientific expeditions for non-biologists to biodiversity hots all over the world (including both rainforests and mountaintops, but also urban parks). The key feature of these trips is to discover and publish entirely new species of wildlife.

Meeting point: At the entrance of the Naturmusée.

Price :. Free of charge.