Giving Compass' Take:

• Lila Higgins is the senior manager of community science at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and co-founder of bioblitz- which is an initiative to get community members to engage with the nature around them in their local neighborhoods.

• How can more environmental community initiatives help spread awareness about the importance of preserving the environment?

• Learn more about the environmental movement for biodiversity and social dynamics in conservation.

They walk carefully across rocks that can be slippery or wobbly, investigating everything from algae to sea hares. Among the explorers is a group from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County of more than 30 people that includes researchers and nature enthusiasts. They’re participating in what’s called a “bioblitz,” where the group observes as much life as possible in a set time frame.

People photograph what they see with the intent of uploading the images to iNaturalist, where they can count toward Los Angeles’ total observations for the 2018 City Nature Challenge.

Lila Higgins, senior manager of community science of NHMLA, co-founded the event two years ago with Alison Young at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences.

City Nature Challenge isn’t just a competition. It’s part of a greater effort to explore urban nature, and it’s one of the under-appreciated advantages of living in the era of smartphones and social media.

Higgins is a champion of using today’s tech to bring together community members and researchers to better understand the lives that exist in our cities. “Seeing people using their smartphones and using social media as a true way to engage with nature as opposed to separating themselves from nature, to me, that’s really cool and really exciting,” she says.

“Los Angeles has an opportunity to be a global leader in researching and understanding the intersection of nature, built environments, and people. To activate that goal, this museum has to promote community science onsite, but more importantly, we have to go out into L.A. neighborhoods and meet people where they are,” says NHMLA president and director Lori Bettison-Varga in a statement from the museum’s publicist. “Lila is very, very good at this — she and her staff develop partnerships with people and organizations that we can sustain long-term.

Read the full article about volunteer conservationists by Liz Ohanesian at GOOD Magazine