Conservation & Crowd-Sourced Maps

This week I came across two interesting examples of organisations using crowd-sourced maps in order to help protect the countryside in the UK.


Butterfly Conservation are holding their annual butterfly count (19th July- 10th August). The butterfly count enables Butterfly Conservation to monitor the health of butterfly species across the UK.

If you visit Butterfly Conservation you can download a Butterfly Chart to help you identify and record butterflies. You then need to find a suitable location and spend just fifteen minutes identifying and recording the butterflies which you see.

All the results from this crowd-sourced butterfly census are then added to the Butterfly Sightings Google Map. The butterfly sightings on the map can be filtered by date, species, habitat and location.


The Campaign to Protect Rural England has released a Google Map to identify brownfield sites across the country.

In order to try and stop the over development of rural land in the countryside the CPRE needs your help to locate brownfield sites where land is being wasted and could be used for property development instead.

#WasteOfSpace is a map of all the brownfield sites identified so far. You can contribute to the map by submitting brownfield sites by e-mail, by Tweet or through Facebook.