Science and the wider population can often seem disconnected from one another. But initiatives enabling people to participate in the scientific endeavour are powerful ways to break this idea. Right now, the Save Waterloo public housing campaign is an example of how social issues often overlap with environmental ones, and how getting people to interact with nature locally can benefit their communities.
The Waterloo renewal project intends to create a new urban area where social housing buildings currently stand. A collective of local residents is actively campaigning for the renovation of old buildings, instead of their demolition. In their fight, they are leveraging iNaturalist, one of the biggest citizen science platforms on the planet, a non-profit organisation allowing anyone to upload a picture to the app and accurately identify a specimen. The plant or animal can then be tracked over time.
As the Waterloo activists fight through the prism of social justice, iNaturalist encourages people to visit the area and help record its biodiversity, to expose potential shortcomings in the environmental value placed on the current site by authorities. At the time of writing, 61 native plant species have already been identified in Waterloo through the iNaturalist platform. This is more than double the number that the NSW Government recognises across the 10.6 hectares of land scheduled to be transformed.
How much weight can this carry in such a large development project? It is hard to tell, and in fact, impossible to predict. But this situation illustrates how science and people can support each other easily. The importance of public engagement for biodiversity assessment has never been greater, worldwide. Platforms allowing non-scientists to report sightings of natural species are now the biggest contributors to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, and improving the accuracy of species identification on these platforms is the subject of active research in Australia.
As Sydneysiders add pictures of Waterloo plants to the iNaturalist inventory, they might not ultimately save the housing buildings but they participate in a collective action that assesses local biodiversity under precarious circumstances, helping bridge the gap between science and communities and shining a light on important social and environmental questions.
References:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/activist-bioblitz-for-waterloo-south?tab=about
Mesaglio et al. (2025). Expert identification blitz: A rapid high value approach for assessing and improving iNaturalist identification accuracy and data precision and confidence. Plants People Planet 7:1469–1484 (DOI: 10.1002/ppp3.70005).
