The Chingaza paramo, which provides 70% of Bogota's drinking water.
Bogota is the administrative and political capital of Colombia, but look a little closer and you’ll see that its also a hot-bed of biodiversity.
Earlier in 2019, as part of a global challenge, users of the iNaturalist scientific crowd-sourcing platform made 2,570 research-grade observations of 544 species, including the Green Dotted Tree Frog, Striped Lightbulb Lizard and Sparkling Violetear.
This city of more than 8 million people home to hundreds of species of insects and plants – appropriate for the capital of the world's second most biodiverse country.
Bogota also depends entirely on biodiversity to exist, as without the delicate paramo ecosystems on the city’s outskirts it would have little safe drinking water. The plants and mosses of the paramo trap moisture from the air, which eventually filters down as pure drinking water. Just one such paramo provides 70% of Bogota’s drinking water.
Juliana Duran, a researcher at the Bogota Botanic Gardens says they are seeing a surge in citizen scientists helping to document the city's biodiversity, which serves many roles, few of which are readily apparent.
“For example, urban trees contribute to water regulation by reducing the pressure on the urban drainage system, thus preventing surface flooding,” she said, adding that the trees also mitigate the city’s direct carbon dioxide emissions, as well as helping to offset the “heat island effect” caused by the gradual replacement of the natural surfaces with impermeable ones like roads and sidewalks.
Duran said one of the main threats to the conservation of urban biodiversity is invasive species.
“The introduction of exotic species in cities is one of the most difficult factors to control because the city is a transformed environment where human activities influence all spheres of this type of ecosystem,” she said.
According to Duran, the city’s “Policy for the Management of Biodiversity in the Capital District” sets strategies and policy guidelines to face the causes of loss and/or transformation of biodiversity, to better guide future management decisions.
“For Bogota, it remains a fundamental challenge of territorial management and planning to keep its paramo present on its border and others located in the region, which are its main source of water supply,” she said.
Duran said plants and animals in the urban area help with soil formation, nutrient recycling and the provision of habitat and food resources for other insects and urban birdlife.
In Bogota, bees are a key part of the ecosystem as well as underpinning urban apiculture and urban agriculture, which can be seen across many of the city’s universities.
Biodiversity also provides cultural services to the mega-city.
“When birds or butterflies visit our parks and urban gardens they provide aesthetic beauty, release stress and provide a natural landscape that citizens value positively.”
“There are several examples in the scientific literature on studies of the cultural services provided by urban biodiversity,” she said.
Elsewhere in Colombia, iNaturalist has been used to catalog thousands more species.
According to Tony Iwane, Outreach and Community Coordinator for iNaturalist, the platform partners with Colombia’s Instituto Humboldt Institute to crowdsource and verify biodiversity: to date there have been over 200,000 verifiable observations of over 12,000 species contributed by over 9000 users.
One particular user took a photo of an animal that had never been photographed alive. The Colombian Weasel was known from just six examples, until it turned up in the bathroom of the parents of architect Juan M. de Roux. Juan took a photo and was then able to identify this elusive weasel from a scientific paper.
Another example of the power of crowd-sourcing occurred in July 2019 at a training workshop in remote Caqueta Department (state) , on the fringe of the Colombian Amazon.
Carolina Soto, leader of the participatory science research group at Colombia's Humboldt Institute showed ex-combatants of Colombia’s long civil war how they could use the app, loaded on heavy-duty tablets, to identity which unique species they have, so they can find eco-tourists who would pay well to observe those birds and animals.
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