White Oak, Quercus alba, leavesMany times you are out birding and something non-avian catches your eye (hard to believe, I know, but it happens). You take a photo and go home to thumb through guidebooks or surf the internet to identify exactly what it is. Sometimes you succeed and other times you are left wondering.
With the explosion of citizen science opportunities (the gold standard of which is eBird), our discoveries do not need to be tucked away in a notebook and forgotten in a desk. iNaturalist and the Vermont Atlas of Life to the rescue!
iNaturalist began as a master’s project at the University of California in 2008. Its objective was to create a way to collect records of any living thing anywhere in the world. This year the Vermont Center for Ecostudies created a project within iNaturalist called the Atlas of Vermont Life. It is an attempt to catalog the state’s wide diversity of living things from microscopic organisms to the largest of our mammals and trees.
And here is the great thing about the project: If you can’t identify something, you can still submit it and, by including the request ID Please, experts from within Vermont and outside may help you with an identification or at least a place in the taxonomic order of things.
Yellow Garden Spider, Argiope aurantiaSo how to participate? Click here and sign up for an account (easy, user name and password). Then upload a photo of your observation, plot it on a map, include a date and any comments (the more information, of course, the better). Check off the ID Please box if you don’t know or are unsure of what it is.
You can upload photos from your own files or from your Facebook, Flickr or Picassa accounts if you use those. And, yes, I have to say it, there’s an app for that – smartphone users can submit their observations from the field using their phone’s camera and GPS capabilities.
Although iNaturalist accepts bird sightings, eBird is the first place to go for those. But there is a lot more to see out there so please consider using iNaturalist - the perfect convergence of nature and technology!