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Semi-Annual Grant Reporting (July 2018) XperiBIRD.be project Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences There are two 6-month report periods each year, ending January 31 and July 31. Please submit Part A (narrative reporting) for each grant reporting period until all grant funds have been exhausted. Submit Part B (financial and impact evaluation) only once each year, during whichever reporting cycle is more convenient for your organization. If you have any questions, [email protected] is happy to help! If all funds have been spent and this is your final report, please indicate this in the space below and attach a narrative summarizing the results of the grant (including progress, lessons learned, and key metrics). Report date : July 2018 Is this the final report for your grant?? NO PART A Organization Information Name “Friends of the RBINS” asbl - Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences Address Vautierstreet, 29 1000 Brussels Fiscal Year End Date 15 December Point of Contact Name: Pierre Coulon Title: Director Public Services / Educational Service Email Address: [email protected] Phone #: +32 (0)2 627 42 25 Grant Information Effective Date 2015.12.23 Term (eg. 2 years) 3 years Amount €681,375 Big Idea An educational network that monitors the nesting of tits at schools across Belgium: Experience the journey from egg to flight! Project Summary XperiBIRD.be is an educational project set up through the partnership (2-3 sentences) between the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) and Google.org. It aims to distribute nest boxes equipped with a camera and a 1 nano-computer to schools and educational partners across Belgium. The kit will allow children from the final year of primary school (10–11 year olds) to the second year of secondary school (13–14 year olds) to follow the nesting of garden birds such as great or blue titmice. The aim is to stimulate their interest in sciences and new information technologies and to collect a large amount of data about nesting habits of passerine birds across Belgium. Those data will be studied by the scientists of the Operational Directorate Natural Environment (Ornithology) of the Museum. Note: There are no word count minimums or maximums for the following questions, but around 50-200 words per question should work well. Summary What were your main objectives during this reporting period? 1. Second campaign: 200 new kits distributed ○ Distribution of the last kits 2017-18 ○ Installation of the kit and use of the camera 2. Support to schools during the nesting period ○ Communication ○ Website ○ Monitor and improve the XperiBIRD.be experience Please summarize the progress you made on those objectives. 1. Second campaign: 200 new kits distributed ○ Distribution of the last kits 2017-18 From September 2017, we focused on recruiting new schools and distributing 200 new observation kits. We reached soon (on 20th September) the 100 kits attributed to French-speaking participants and most of them received their kits before the end of the year. Only few kits, distributed thanks to the XperiLAB.be truck were distributed after the winter. We reached the quota for Dutch-speaking participants only at the end of the year 2017. Therefore, a more important number of schools received their kit at the beginning of 2018 (January to February). 2 Figure 1: The network of XperiBIRD.be nest boxes installed (screenshot, interactive map : July 2018) ○ Installation of the kit and use of the camera After they received their XperiBIRD.be observation kit, teachers have to install it and to connect the camera themselves. To help them doing this, the installation guide had been updated (based on experience and comments of the first edition participants). And we promoted (via e-mail and on the website) the use of our video tutorial guiding them through the whole installation process, step by step. We provided also an “Helpdesk” via e-mail or phone. We encouraged all participants to test the material well in advance, viz. well before the nesting season, and to contact us as soon as possible if they encounter any problem. All technical problems were tracked and gathered in a common shared document. When a camera was not functional, we always tried first to solve the problem via e-mail or phone call, but sometimes we had to ask the school to send back the electronic material. Then the repaired (or a new) camera was sent back to the school. The defect cameras we were not able to fix ourselves were sent back to Naturebytes, our electronic material provider. In total, from 200 kits distributed, at least 115 were installed. From which at least 45 were used by a couple of blue or great tit during the nesting season. We rely on the data filled on the website by the schools, but we suspect more bird boxes were installed and used by birds, but that all schools didn’t enter their observation data yet. 2. Support the schools during the nesting period ○ Communication Most of the communication with the schools has been done via e-mails. We sent from 1 to 3 e-mails per month prior to /during and after the nesting period. Those e-mails were containing important information regarding the actions to be undertaken, reminders on the importance to geo-localized the nest box and enter their observation data, etc. We emphasis on the importance to contact us as soon as possible if they encountered any technical issues. Most of the problems could have been solved thanks to instructions sent by e-mail or given by phone. 3 ○ Website During this period, only few modifications were made on the website since it appeared to be already quite complete, based on the experience of the first nesting period. We had to create accounts on the website for new users, and login / password were sent via e-mail in January. We updated on a regular basis the website. For example, different documents were uploaded in the “documentation” page in the User section. So that participants can easily find all material related to installation and use of the kit, as well as manuals on how to use the website, and last but not least, different kind of didactic documents in order to conduct activities around XperiBIRD.be with their pupils. Thanks to the help of a student doing his internship at the museum we were able to publish regularly news on the homepage. Those articles related key moments of the breeding season and were relayed via social media as well. Figure 2: The News section of XperiBIRD.be website has been regularly updated This year, it was also possible to differentiate occupied nest boxes from empty nest boxes on the interactive map! Whenever a school completed the “nesting species” field in the nesting data form, the nest box changed from green to yellow on the map! Figure 3: Interactive map showing empty nest boxes (screenshot, July 2018) 4 ○ Monitor and improve the XperiBIRD.be experience At the end of the school year 2017, we designed two surveys, in collaboration with the Google team (regarding the STEMS) and the DITOS team (EU Horizon 2020 project aimed to measure the impact of various participative sciences activities). This year, these surveys have been updated by the XperiBIRD.be team and sent to all participants during the month of June. This time, a Google form has been designed for pupils as well in addition to the paper version of the survey (in order to increase the number of responses). So far, we collected a total of 74 forms from teachers (38 from Dutch-speaking and 36 from French-speaking participants) and 78 students surveys (from 3 French-speaking schools). The data collected through the two questionnaires will be analyzed during this summer and should help us to improve / ease the experience of the participants. We plan to reiterate the experience next year in order to monitor the impact of the project and to consolidate the results obtained. Do you anticipate any major changes in the next phase of the project? No major changes are foreseen for the future, as the project runs fine. Some practical aspects could nevertheless be improved but don’t consist in major changes (see § “Learning from failures”). On the other hand, we intend to extend the project duration to a third breeding season, what is a substantial change and improvement of the global work schedule. The project original timing (and granting) was ending in December 2018. At that time, we will have 2 bird nesting datasets corresponding to 2 breeding seasons, namely spring 2017 and spring 2018. The 2018 last months were thus supposed to be dedicated to different conclusive tasks: ● Optimize the number of data: cleaning of database, direct dialog with schools to encourage them to “finish the job”… ● scientific analysis by ornithologists, reporting… ● Recuperation of “dormant” material ● etc… However, the success of the campaign, the numerous demands from new schools eager to participate conducted us to extend the project to a 3rd breeding season and thus a third distribution of birdbox during this winter in order to be ready for spring 2019. Thanks to a Google Belgium financial help to buy more material and support the distribution fees and thank to a complementary grant from Google.org via the TIDE foundation, we are capable to guarantee the distribution of 250 supplementary kits to reach a total of 650 connected birdbox spread over Belgian territory. In consequences, most of the data treatment and analysis will be delayed to the summer 2019, provisional end date of the project. We can therefore expect small changes in the next phases of the project, due to more questions / requests from teachers than last years.

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