“Be Butterfly Friendly” will ‘fly’ with butterflies across Portugal
The citizen science project Be Butterfly Friendly (BBF), supported by the Portuguese Association for Environmental Education (ASPEA), will build a network of butterfly ambassadors in Portugal to understand and reverse the decline of these insects.
The project will be launched nationwide on January 25th at 9:30 am, through a short-term action aimed at teachers, university students, environmental educators and environmental technicians from the municipalities.
After the success of the pilot project in schools in the municipality of Oeiras, which reached around 15 schools and 200 students, the BBF wants to continue raising awareness about the protection and conservation of pollinators in educational institutions, but also expand the reach to citizen scientists, groups of young people and adults.
In this sense, the project carries out a training course on Lepidoptera, diurnal butterflies, which totals 10 hours to mark the beginning of the BBF at a national level. The short-term action is accredited for teachers by the Portuguese Ecology Society (SPECO). The first part (7 hours) takes place on January 25th at the ASPEA headquarters (Parque do Calhau, in Lisbon) and the second on March 8th at the National Museum of Natural History and Science – University of Lisbon (3 hours). Registration for the action has now closed after the available places have been filled.
This school year, the BBF is open to schools across the country, to the entire educational community and to citizens who want to participate in monitoring butterflies during school hours or in other green spaces. Registration for the project must be done at this link.
In its first phase, the project develops training courses such as the one that marks the national launch. In the second phase, the project is developed at the school or green space (by class or individually/group, respectively). This phase involves creating/maintaining and monitoring butterfly gardens with host species for butterfly caterpillars or nectar-bearing plants. The data will be collected by the iNaturalist app and integrated into the Biodiversity4all umbrella project dedicated to the project.
The project will also promote the 2nd edition of the “Planting Butterflies” drawing competition and organize field trips in the spring, to recognize the importance, causes and consequences of the decline of pollinating insects.
“The continuation of this project is largely based on the desire to allow other citizens to also be made aware of the role of butterflies in natural ecosystems and food production,” explains ASPEA vice-president and project coordinator, Clarisse Ferreira.
“It is important for me to promote forms of contact between citizens, especially children, and Nature. The success of the pilot project and the feedback received demonstrate that the strategy used can be easily replicated by other schools and that there is interest from the educational community in addressing this issue”, he further notes.
Be Butterfly Friendly is supported by the Department of Biology and the Center for Environmental and Marine Studies, both at the University of Aveiro, by Polli.NET – Collaborative Network for the Assessment, Conservation and Enhancement of Pollinators and Pollination, and by Oeiras City Council. The pilot project received a grant of 1,379 euros from the Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency of Taiwan, an organization of the Ministry of Agriculture of Taiwan dedicated to sustainable forest management and nature conservation.
About ASPEA
The Portuguese Association for Environmental Education (ASPEA) is a non-governmental environmental organization (NGO), founded in 1990, which has 30 years of experience in environmental awareness, training and qualification, consultancy and development of environmental education projects and programs. Environmental on various environmental and sustainability topics, for a wide range of actors and audiences, in the forms of formal, non-formal and informal educational action.
ASPEA has its headquarters in Lisbon and branches in Aveiro, Braga, Bragança and the Azores.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and TikTok and see the exclusive content for social networks.