A project that has recruited hundreds of citizen scientists to help document the recovery of bushfire-affected areas is helping some participants deal with grief of losing their homes.
In the days after a bushfire tore through her Southern Highlands home, Casey Kirchhoff felt the first green shoots of an idea starting to sprout.It has received more than 7,400 photos and sound recordings from citizen scientists"I was really excited to grab onto any sign of life on my own property and I thought I'd like to start documenting things reshooting," she said.
Since January, hundreds of citizen scientists have signed up to the iNaturalist website and uploaded more than 7,400 photographs of fire-affected plants and animals along Australia's east coast and parts of South Australia.One of them is Railie Douglas, whose family property in the Mid-North Coast town of Hillville went up in flames in November.
"[The fire] rolled in from the east and rolled on over us and kept on going and then turned around and came back," she said.The project has given Ms Douglas an even closer connection to their 330-acre property, which she describes as her "happy place"."It's also something that I can document and I can track and I feel like I can have some input into the regeneration process.
Ms Douglas has been much more pleased to see some animals — including whip birds, wallabies, bandicoots and possums — returning.
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