The India Biodiversity Portal has seen increasing participation over the last year. We have run targeted campaigns, facilitated participation and used social media and targeted mailings to increase participation. This has resulted in increased content, growing user registrations, and enhanced numbers of observations as well as species pages on the portal.

We have followed multiple strategies that we think have had a bearing on increased participation. Over the last year the portal has run several targeted campaigns on specific topics, conducted pilot programs with schools, and attended and exposed the portal at workshops and bioblitzes. All this has increased participation on the portal. We have also enabled many components on the portal for public participation. These include the ability to make simple comments, suggest species names, enhance documentation of observations, add open tags to observations records, allow participation in species pages, confirm identifications, and include media from observations into species pages. Leaders, founders and moderators of groups encourage users with mail notifications and follow-up, which expose users to the activity on the portal.

These features and activities have encouraged participation on the portal.  Participation increases seem to be the beginning of an exponential curve. However considering the scale of the country, the extent of diversity of the landscape, and the rich biodiversity of tropical India, we are at the tip of the iceberg. We will analyse data on participation, some of the results of campaigns, and derive patterns of learning for citizen science from the India Biodiversity Portal.