Unlocking Nature with Data - Greentalk and London Data Week
Participants in London Data Week took part in a trial event in Islington to understand the impact of their actions
About the Event
9th July 2025 - Greentalk helped organise and run Unlocking Nature with Data - Designing Citizen Science Tools For Impact as part of the London Data Week 2025.
Working alongside Outlandish, Tranquil City, Pollenize, and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park Innovation District we explored the question:
How can we combine policy, citizen science and ecological data to drive real-world change?
We explored how data, community participation and digital tools can help deliver on policy and encourage public action.
Greentalk in Action
With more than 30 participants, Greentalk demonstrated how members of the local community could support and help monitor greenspace interventions. These interventions include rain gardens (also known as Sustainable Drainage Systems, or SuDS) and tree planting.Collecting data to monitor how the interventions are performing helps to inform subsequent interventions, catch issues early on and allows simple and effective maintenance tasks to be done at the right time.
Involving citizens and local residents helps them understand and appreciate the value of the interventions.
Through this, Greentalk helps foster community ownership, environmental stewardship and resident involvement - all of which are essential for protecting and promoting biodiversity and community health.
The Project Location
Tollington Park, Islington, London N4.
The stretch of Tollington Park road outside Christ the King Primary School is one of Islington Council’s school street rain garden interventions. This recent project introduced new greening including planting and trees to improve air quality and create a more pleasant environment, along with other improvements helping deliver a range of health and wellbeing benefits by reducing air pollution, and by making it easier for children to exercise regularly. After a period of consultation the work was implemented in early 2025.
You can read more about the project on [Islington’s website] (https://www.letstalk.islington.gov.uk/improvements-outside-christ-the-king-primary-school)
The Trial Location
Tollington Park, Islington, London N4.
The stretch of Tollington Park road outside Christ the King Primary School is one of Islington Council’s school street rain garden interventions. This recent project introduced new greening including planting and trees to improve air quality and create a more pleasant environment, along with other improvements helping deliver a range of health and wellbeing benefits by reducing air pollution, and by making it easier for children to exercise regularly. After a period of consultation the work was implemented in early 2025.
You can read more about the project on [Islington’s website] (https://www.letstalk.islington.gov.uk/improvements-outside-christ-the-king-primary-school)
The Trial Event
Greentalk led a hands-on walking workshop at the newly created rain garden, and used Microactions to engage the participants and collect data.
Greentalk is designed for the care of interventions through their first few critical years by providing insightful observations, monitoring and maintenance microactions.
What is a Microaction?
A Greentalk Microaction is any type of simple, achievable, measurable activity that a citizen, community group, or business may undertake to support your strategy. It can be simple, or complex, individual or collective. It can be suitable for beginners or require some training.
Monitoring the biodiversity of a rain garden with photos and counting, adopting a newly planted tree, inspecting a street tree, maintaining a community garden, planting and tracking a home wildlife garden, surveying a local green space are all microactions which Greentalk can enable and support.
Impact for Nature Care
During the event a number of Microactions were demonstrated
| Microaction | Goal | Results |
|---|---|---|
| Count Flowering Plants | Tracking flowering plants helps identify seasonal patterns, habitat quality, changes in local biodiversity and feed into maintenance plans. Providing all year round flowering is important for biodiversity and for users of the school. |
Participants collected a mid-summer baseline to check against over the forthcoming year. |
| Count Insects | Insect counts are key indicators of ecosystem health and food availability for birds and pollinators. The microaction encourages the participant to stop for a minute and look and count insects. | Initial expectations were low, but that extra time to properly look revealed some surprises. The numbers were high despite being right beside a busy road. This baseline can be used to compare with later in the year and see if the rain garden is providing support for year round biodiversity. |
| Check a Newly Planted Tree | New trees are very vulnerable in their first 3 years and need care, and regular checks can prevent failure due to drought, pests, or damage. Adoption allows a citizen to take on caring for a tree near their home or work. | Three newly planted trees were all reported as being in good condition, with no obvious health issues and their supporting stakes, ties, and watering pipes all good. |
| Litter Count & Pick | Recording and removing litter reduces pollution and hazards for wildlife, while offering insight into human attitude and impact. Regularly litter picking prevents unsightly build up and demonstrates that this is a cared for place, encouraging passers by to treat it with respect. | At first glance litter levels seemed quite low, but the timed microaction encouraged people to spend a little longer which led to seeing more. |
| Inspect a Street Tree | Street tree inspections can catch signs of stress, disease, or damage early, keeping the urban forest thriving. |
The existing trees appear to have benefited from the rain garden being created around them, perhaps water flow to their roots had been improved by removing some of the paving. |
| Rain Garden Drainage Checks | Simple inspections of rain gardens (SuDS) can catch issues early before they become expensive maintenance issues | The drainage pathways appeared unblocked. |
Impact for Wellbeing
We collaborated with Grant Waters from Tranquil City to explore the wellbeing benefits of engaging with nature through this workshop.
Grant writes…
Participants were asked a series of questions on how they felt before and after the walk, to understand how the activities affected their wellbeing. This was part of Tranquil City’s Make My City Thrive impact assessment framework, designed to capture the subjective benefits of engaging in nature.
The analysis found that following the walk and activities, people felt happier, more relaxed and more connected to nature. The participants also expressed how the activities were educational and collaborative, demonstrating how the walk helped to spark curiosity and reflections on how urban nature impacts us. These results show the potential for how such interventions can boost wellbeing, even when performing microactions and short periods of engaging with nature.
On average, participants felt 26% more relaxed, 22% more connected to nature and 8% happier than before the walk began. Of the 28 participants, 25 people felt more relaxed, 19 felt more connected to nature, and 9 felt happier after the activities. The gender split was 54% men and 46% women, with a relatively distributed age range weighted towards 18-29 years.
When asked to provide three words or a statement to describe their experience of the walk (89% response rate), our analysis showed that 60% of responses were positive in sentiment, with the most frequent words used being “interesting”, “relaxing”, “educational” and “fun”, and no negative responses recorded.
The key themes that emerged were Learning and Discovery, with participants describing the walk as “educational”, “informative”, “insightful” and “enlightening”. Wellbeing and Relaxation, with descriptors like “refreshing, grounding, unwinding”, and Connection and Community, with one noting the experience was “exploratory, calming, collaborative”.
What People Are Saying
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
— Quote Source
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
— Quote Source
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
— Quote Source
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
— Quote Source
Make it stand out.
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Dream it.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
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Build it.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
