Current projects

Your cat - our researcher Attention cat owners in Vorarlberg! Under the motto "Show me your mouse, cat!", we are collecting dead mice and other small mammals that your cat brings to your home. From June to November 2024, you can hand in these "gifts" from your cat to us…

Mental Health around Childbirth This project focuses on the mental health of parents around childbirth, aiming to detect issues early and provide better support. The goal is to promote the emotional well-being of parents and infants and improve access to support services in Tyrol. What are the aims of the…

Mosquito Alert is a citizen science project that allows tiger mosquitoes and other mosquitoes to be easily reported using a free app. Tiger mosquitoes are always smaller than a 1-cent coin, have a single white line on the back of the head and thoraxand white stripes on the body and legs.…

Plastic Pirates - Go Europe! A Citizen Science Initiative to investigate plastic pollution along rivers The pollution of beaches and riverbanks in Europe with plastic waste does not stop at borders. Preventing micro- and macroplastics in the environment, addressing this challenge scientifically and researching sustainable materials are therefore tasks we…

DESIGNING AN INFORMATION TOOL FOR CARDIAC REHABILITATION Background Previous research has shown that after an acute cardiac event, such as a heart attack, patients can feel uninformed about the follow-up care and cardiac rehabilitation. Digital technologies have the potential to make health-related information available at any time and in a…

A couple of Instagram stories here a TikTok video there: The pervasiveness of our everyday lives with more and more media content consumed in a short period of time has completely changed the way we access and deal with information: Due to their everyday use of and the strong fusion…

Relevance of mathematics lessons from the students' perspective The relevance that students attribute to mathematics education is a crucial variable for its success. Against this background, it is surprising that there is little international scientific evidence on these ideas. Instead, it is evident in various countries, including Austria, that students…

Breaking the blame game:  COwLEARNING for sustainable beef and dairy supply  Our society faces grand challenges, such as mitigating climate change and adapting to its consequences, ensuring a healthy diet and maintaining cultural landscapes with high biodiversity. A sustainable agri-food industry addresses these challenges.  In Austria, with its high share…

Giving a voice to children and adolescents: Co-research with children and adolescents in developing a model of health literacy Background Health literacy is crucial for promoting health and well-being It encompasses finding, understanding, evaluating, and applying health information and services to make informed decisions for maintaining or improving health and…

A project of the Viennese environmental protection department In spring (from early April), there's no doubt: the first swallows and swifts have returned from Africa to breed in Vienna. Other species, like house sparrow and jackdaw, have spent the winter with us and have already occupied their breeding places. House…

Spring mapping in the Großes Walsertal Biosphere Reserve (Austria) In view of increasing extreme weather events, including periods of drought and consequent water shortages, the protection and knowledge of springs in the Großes Walsertal Biosphere Reserve is becoming increasingly important. In addition to their essential role in water supply, springs…

Citizen Mapping as a Practice of City-Making The project “City Layers: Citizen Mapping as a Practice of City-Making”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) introduces a contemporary framework for city-mapping which centres on citizen experience of urban space as an integrative way to contribute to more egalitarian city design. Within the frame of the Citizen…

Many archaeological artifacts today are only preserved in fragments. Reassembling these parts into their original form is therefore an important but challenging task for archaeology.  Computer-assisted methods can facilitate this task or even partially solve it in some cases. However, due to the usually poor preservation of these artifacts and…

DeVOTE is a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) from January 2021 to December 2025, and led by Ass.-Prof. Carolina Plescia to develop and apply a new approach to study what ‘voting’ means for ordinary citizens. The project’s goals are: understand what ‘voting’ means for ordinary citizens; examine the variation…

The Pollen Diary was launched back in 2009 as a scientific project as part of a master's thesis at the WU Vienna Executive Academy. Meanwhile it has become an important service for pollen allergy sufferers in 13 European countries: Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, Sweden, Finland, Croatia, Hungary, Lithuania, Serbia,…

The lack of sustainability in human activity is leading to the global destabilisation of our natural systems. The resulting biodiversity and climate crises require a transformation to an environmentally sustainable society. However, the expertise in the field of taxonomy required for this transformation is often only shared by a few…

“Healthy Soil" research platform for Viennese community gardens As a follow-up project to "Heavy Metal City-Zen", we are once again inviting Viennese community gardens, garden projects or similar garden initiatives to take part in this project and conduct research together with us.  The aim of this project is to scientifically…

The golden jackal (Canis aureus) was not considered native in Austria, until the first golden jackal discovery was made in 1987, followed by sporadic records scattered over several federal states and in 2007 the first reproduction record was documented in the National Park "Neusiedler See-Seewinkel". Since then, rumours about camera…

Citizen science-based bumblebee monitoring is a pillar of the Austrian wild bee survey. Most wild bee species can only be distinguished under a microscope. The genus of bumblebees (Bombus) is an exception and can usually be distinguished at species level after a training phase in the field (see Gokcezade et…

In this citizen science project of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, we would like to create an overview of where animals are roadkilled and what reasons there might be for this. In the Roadkill project, we would like to cooperate with you in many ways, because…

Every observation counts! The City Nature Challenge (short: CNC) is an annual nature competition between regions that takes place in spring (usually at the end of April, beginning of May) and is held simultaneously in various cities and regions worldwide. On four consecutive days, people around the world document the…

What are Urban Heat Stories? It will get hotter and hotter in the city over the next few years. The impact of heat can vary greatly from neighborhood to neighborhood. It depends not only on the building density or the degree of sealing in the city, but also on the…

Since 2006, a wide variety of nature observations can be reported on naturbeobachtung.at. Specially designed reporting masks for various groups of animals, plants and fungi allow detailed entries. The reporters can, as far as possible, identify their observations taxonomically or report them as "undetermined species". The latter can then be…

Amphibians and reptiles under observation in Austria Importance and evaluability of databases increase with the extent, the precision and the currency of the data stored. The Natural History Museum Vienna, one of the largest non-university research institutions in Austria, houses more than 30 million objects from the fields of biology,…

Important groundwork for bird protection The association BirdLife Austria has been researching and protecting the native avifauna for over 50 years. Citizen science has always been an essential basis of this work, as BirdLife's expertise is based on decades of collecting bird records. In the past, observations were recorded on…

Have you ever seen a sparrow hawk in Vienna? Did a badger cross your path on your way home at night? Or do you have swallow nests at your housing complex? We are interested in your observations in Austrian cities! The project works specifically in urban areas. With the help…

The CAMALIOT (Application of Machine Learning Technology for GNSS IoT Data Fusion) project The CAMALIOT project integrates data from the Internet of Things (IoT), including smartphones, and traditional Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data sources to leverage Big Data, Data Fusion and Machine Learning technologies to to demonstrate how these data can be used in different scientific…

In Viel-Falter: Butterfly Monitoring volunteers, together with researchers from the Department of Ecology of the University of Innsbruck, observe, identify and count butterflies. The aim is to build up and establish an Austria-wide systematic butterfly monitoring. Butterflies are an excellent indicator group for the ecologically extremely important animal group of insects.…

Due to the enormous request and the multitude of consignments of fossil images encompassing almost the entire Earth history, the precise issues and the resulting project target were adapted in accordance to the requirements and wishes oft he citizen scientists. The geographical and chronological distribution of fossils in Austria is…

Biodiversity and ecology of freshwater bacteria The bacterial genus Aquirufa, which was discovered and scientifically described in cooperation with pupils, is the eponym and focus of the research project. The aim is to research the ecology, biodiversity and distribution of Aquirufa in water bodies through the active and creative participation…

What is this project about? How can good people do bad things? How can people act contrary to their moral beliefs without having a bad conscience? White lies, rule bending, finding excuses for our own behaviour, which we would judge others for … To be honest, we have all done…

"Pilzfinder" - what it's all about Until a few decades ago, knowledge of wild edible and poisonous mushrooms was widespread. Especially the older population knew about the seasonal occurrence of the mushrooms. Finding mushrooms is a popular hobby for young and old, which is accompanied by great experience. In order…

What is the project about? The crowdsourcing project "Viennese playbills 1930-1939" is about the metadata capture of the playbills from the holdings of the Vienna City Library from this period. Previously only organized by theater and not indexed individually, during the project these valuable historical sources will become recorded individually and thus discoverable for…

What is the project about? The crowdsourcing project "Letters 1914-1919" is about the transcription of the unique letter collection of the Vienna City Library from this period. In contrast to historical printed works, which are now subjected to automatic full-text recognition as standard, this is still not so easy to…

From alpine crested newt to sand lizard - gardening enthusiasts report please Private gardens not only provide a place of peace and relaxation for humans but can also serve as important habitats and stepping stones for many animal and plant species. Especially the two endangered species groups of amphibians and…

We take care of our meadows and alpine pastures! For more than a decade, hundreds of farmers have been saying "We look at our meadows and alpine pastures!". The regular observations of the more than 700 participants impressively show that on more than 80 % of the monitoring plots in…

Flexibilisation of WF-mowing dates according to the phenological model  The ÖPUL-measure Nature Conservation results in farmers usually having an agreement on a fixed mowing date. Due to the ongoing climate change, vegetation development fluctuates more and more especially during spring and early summer. Therefore, it was proposed to expand the…

Overview You can tell by its name: The forest dormouse (Dryomys nitedula) is a characteristic species for deciduous and mixed forests. It belongs to the dormouse family and its survival is inextricably linked with forest habitats. The forest dormouse is protected throughout Europe, but data on its distribution is largely…

Participatory exploration of the "Kremser scorpion” (Euscorpius tergestinus) with school students "Triestino scorpion" (Euscorpius tergestinus - still listed as E. carpathicus in the Red List of NÖ), which are threatened with extinction in Lower Austria, exists as an archaeozoon in Krems. This population is an isolated north-eastern outpost of the…

The mammoth wasp Megascolia maculate is the largest wasp species in Europe with a body length of up to 4.5 cm. In Austria, a few specimens of the mediterranean species were found in Vienna and Lower Austria at the end of the 19th century. Since then, there have been sporadic sightings in…

"Crows in the zoo" is a Citizen Science project of the Department for Behavioral and Cognitive Biology of the University of Vienna in cooperation with the Konrad Lorenz Research Center and the Zoo Vienna. The researchers aim to find out more about the species and subspecies of crows that use the…

In spring, scientists invite everybody around Europe to take part in the biggest cowslip observation campaign “Looking for Cowslips”. The aim of the project is to examine the patterns of flower morphological traits (i. e. heterostyly) in cowslip populations all across Europe using a citizen science approach. The citizen science…

The European genealogy database "Connecting genealogists" GenTeam is a European platform of genealogical databases. Both scientists and amateur genealogists can make their data available here for free for other researchers. The cooperation of collaborators from many different countries has made it possible to compile databases that one researcher could not…

The kestrel is the most common raptor in the city of Vienna. Since 2010, the "Vienna Kestrel Project" has been investigating how these falcons have adapted to city life. A key component of our research is knowledge about nest locations which allow us to access broods for further investigation. The…

The “Blick ins Dickicht” project is dedicated to the search for the smallest native dormouse – the hazel dormouse. Until now, only very little has been known about this rare small animal. In order to learn more about its way of life and also how best protect it in working…