Excursions from April - November 2024
Insect-Excursion (Photo: jowen,
CC BY-SA 2.0 ) (excerpt)
Dear members, dear guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Now that winter seems to be completely absent this year and the spring bloomers are delighting us ahead of time, we are once again presenting a summer program that hopefully corresponds to this weather mood. In keeping with tradition, the NWV summer is characterized by excursions of all kinds. On the one hand, there are excursions as natural history tours through striking parts of the landscape, plants and animals encountered by the group are explained and ecological relationships are explained. Today, such excursions fall under the term "environmental education" and the events listed in the program mostly fulfil this task by addressing an interested public in a generally understandable way. However, the working groups also bring together people who are more intensively involved with an animal or plant group and carry out excursions at their meetings, during which distribution data is collected and documented, new discoveries are made or observations on the temporal occurrence are collected, thus making important contributions to the knowledge of the local flora and fauna. Today, such excursions and their evaluations are categorized as "citizen science", an activity that our association has been carrying out successfully for 150 years, even though the term did not yet exist. Citizen science means independent, solid research with its own questions by people with very different educational biographies. This is also a good tradition in the association. But tradition is not an end in itself; it is also important to get younger people interested in the working groups and excursions. The Marine Science Society and other working groups are also very successful with evening meetings in the summer.
Perhaps we should not underestimate the social component of the exchange of professional experience. With this in mind, I wish us all an instructive and productive summer, with joy in our observations and optimism despite all the gloomy prospects that all too easily cloud our view.
Date: 10. June 2024
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