You might have seen the recent articles in the news and press release from UWA that we will be redeveloping the Microblitz program!  The full press release from UWA is located here for those that are interested, and you might have seen the Perth Now article as well (which was printed in the Sunday Times on the previous weekend).

The historical Microblitz app – soon to be redeveloped!

Around 18 months ago, Andy Whiteley and his team from the University of Western Australia (UWA) approached us to develop the Microblitz project, where we developed an iOS mobile app for citizen scientists to record where they take soil samples that are then sent back in to the lab at UWA.  The program was launched back in February of 2016 (as we outlined in our blog then), and since then it’s been steadily ticking away, although the program has been quiet for some time.  Meanwhile, we’ve been exploring opportunities with Andy and the team to get things rolling again, and one of these was to investigate potential grants.

The short version of the last 12 months is that UWA (with our support) applied for one of the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science grants for citizen science – and we were successful, along with a range of other organisations!

So we’ll be looking at reworking the Microblitz program, and updating the underlying technology with our new toolkit for citizen science.  We’ve already launched a redeveloped DolphinWatch app in this new toolkit, and we’ll have quite a few more projects launching in the next six months – so watch this space!

Piers

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