Get involved!
What do you need to do?
You have two protocols in which you can collaborate: live trapping and diet analysis. The first one is based on the placement of 36 live capture traps in a square or rectangular shape plot: this sampling is carried out twice a year and involves four days in spring and four days in autumn. For more information, we recommend reading the methodology.
Before taking charge of a SEMICE live trapping station, keep in mind that your contribution to the project will be more valuable the longer your continuity. The first step to start your collaboration is to contact the coordination team by means of this form. In order to gain experience in the identification and handling of animals, it is important to participate in one of the training courses or to help active collaborators during a minimum of two sampling campaigns before establishing your own plot or taking one that is inactive.
If you have the possibility to collect pellets and analyse them, you can incorporate your results and thus also help at expanding knowledge about the distribution and abundance of small mammals.
Don’t hesitate!
The network of collaborators
Some plots are included in the monitoring plans of some protected natural areas and are handled by technicians from the same area. Volunteers, who are key for the continuity of the project, coordinate other stations. Since 2016, every year there are around 30 people involved in the project, who develop the sampling of one or more monitoring stations.
If you access the map of the stations, you will see where they are located and who is responsible for them. The year 2021 was the first in which the project reached a hundred active stations simultaneously.
One of the years in which more plots were incorporated was 2019, thanks in part to the expansion of the project to a large part of the protected natural spaces managed by the Generalitat de Catalunya and Diputació de Barcelona.
What does the project offer to collaborators?
SEMICE is a good opportunity to help growing a volume of data that enables the estimation of the abundance of small mammal populations and their evolution: two key aspects for understanding the functioning of ecosystems. In addition, it allows you to observe the diversity of species at a local scale, turning each collaborator into the maximum expert in the area. Finally, there is also the possibility of sharing the sampling campaigns with other people or even opening them to small family groups through the organization of a Mice Night or Day in the plot.
SEMICE meeting in 2023. Parc Natural de Sant Llorenç del Munt i l’Obac, 20th May.
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