iNaturalist July News Highlights

Happy August everyone! Apologies for the late arrival of these July highlights. With northern hemisphere summer in full swing, it was very hard cutting this one down to a manageable number. If you’d like to catch up on highlights from the previous month you can do so here.

Species Discoveries

A. In Angola, @craigpeter’s observation of a scarab is the only record and first living photograph since the species was first collected in 2017. It helped inform the species description here.

B. In Australia, @thebeachcomber, @wcornwell and colleagues have been using iNaturalist to fill first living photograph gaps in the Australian Flora. Their paper this month describes their progress.

Range Extensions

C. In North Carolina, @sam_blue and others resurveyed the northernmost population of Pine Woods Littersnake as described in their paper.

D. In England, @regan98646 and colleagues used iNaturalist observations of Jersey Tiger like this one by @megxkat to reveal range extensions into urban areas unnoticed by traditional monitoring.

E. In South Carolina, @whiteoak and colleagues recount how @picbor’s observation was identified by @ungberg as a new population of the threatened Golden Sedge.

Invasive Species Science

In this Salon article, Robert Venette from the United States Department of Agriculture explains: "reporting new finds of invasive species is incredibly important. Free cell phone apps, like iNaturalist, make it pretty easy, even for amateurs." Here are three examples on how iNaturalist is helping locate and manage invasive species.

F. In Australia, @eroger and colleagues from the Australian government describe how iNaturalist provided them with 150 biosecurity alerts in 12-months including this first public record of an invasive cactus by @darren_fielder.

G. In South Africa, @ruanveldt explains how his German Common Yellowjacket Invasion project is helping monitor and manage this introduced wasp.

H. In Hawaii, @kevinfaccenda describes in this paper how access to global expertise such as this Nursery Bittercress ID by @ajwright is helping better understand Hawaii’s introduced flora. This global scope is one of the reasons iNaturalist is such a powerful tool for tracking invasive species.

Conservation

iNaturalist is a critical tool for conservation by helping managers understand how distributions and communities are changing over time. This month, ESRI, a GIS platform used by thousands of governments and land managers, integrated a subset of iNaturalist observations into the ArcGIS Living Atlas making these data even more accessible to the conservation community.

I. In New Zealand, @williambrockelsby and colleagues published a study describing their moth monitoring project to understand how the community has changed since initial surveys 100 years ago.

J. In Connecticut, @tammor learned that some rare ferns actually prefer microclimates provided in urban habitat. You can read the study here.

K. In California, @azoologist and colleagues use iNaturalist observations of Western Black-headed Snake like this one by @temminicki to make an updated distribution map and explore how our understanding of the distribution of this snake has changed over time.

Climate Change

L. In the southwest US, @jbyoder and colleagues used over 10,000 iNaturalist images of flowering Joshua Tree’s such as these by @brewbooks, @matt_bristol, @gregg29, and @karinp111 to reconstruct 120 years of climate change impacts on flowering phenology.

M. In Australia, this article describes mass migrations of spider crab’s into shallow waters driven by unusual upwellings and tracked by the Spider Crab Watch project via observations like this one by @spikes68

N. In Vancouver Canada, observations like this one by @erichabisch were used in this article to describe how a wet cool spring has plummeted the proportion of butterfly observations relative to all insects to 5% compared with 11% last year.

iEcology

O. In Uganda, @bwarner03, @maxallen and colleagues used inaturalist images like this one from @nikborrow to understand color aberration in malachite kingfishers.

P. In this paper by @caseydunn and colleagues, iNaturalist images of Portugues man-o’-war from around the world such as these by @mrpopp, @andrewgillespie, @twan3253, and @william_stephens were used to identify morphologically distinct subpopulations within this globally distributed species.

AI Naturalist

Q. AI is playing an increasing role in supporting iEcology studies that leverage patterns in images like the examples above. In this paper, the authors used iNaturalist images like this one from @soenkebonde to train models that automatically segment and extract color from species in the photos.

Bioblitzes and Events

R. National Moth Week was the biggest ever on iNaturalist this year with over 30,000 participants sharing over 200,000 observations representing nearly 10,000 species. There was great coverage in the media such as this article in EntomologyToday and events held around the world such as this gathering organized by @mollymjacobson in upstate New York.

Other July bioblitzes we’re highlighting this month were:

• In Canada, the Big Backyard Bioblitz covered here.
• In Nantucket, the 2024 Nantucket Bioblitz covered here.
• In Texas, the Fishes of Texas Bioblitz covered here.
• In Florida, the Snail Search Bioblitz covered here.

Restoration and Stewardship

S. In Canada, this story describes @brad22682 and colleagues at the Gorge Waterway Action Society efforts to “renaturalize” a portion of Gorge Creek that was once home to volleyball courts and swimming pools. Observations by @bryn_ and many others are helping track restoration progress.

Elsewhere in Canada, we saw iNaturalist community efforts to restore native vegetation by removing invasive Himalayan Balsam and efforts to decrease threatened Western Painted Turtles mortality by restoring fragmented habitats.

In Florida, we highlight iNaturalist projects to make lawns better habitat for pollinators. In Oregon, we highlight iNaturalist's role in efforts to restore kelp forests.

iNaturalist in the Classroom

T. In Malaysia, this paper describes @mohd_amli, @annaahmad, @muniratul_husna, and colleagues at the Universiti Teknologi MARA’s efforts to incorporate iNaturalist into their curriculum by organizing student bioblitzes like this one attended by @damya and others.

This paper describes how Seek by iNaturalist in the classroom can help meet Next Generation Science Standards.

iNaturalist and Human Health

U. Connection to nature is essential to human wellbeing. In Australia, @hollykirk and colleagues used iNaturalist data to explore how people access nature. Their paper highlights the importance of informal green spaces like railway and utility easements. Interestingly, this PNAS paper used similar methods to measure tourism outcomes in African protected areas.

Other highlights on the intersection of iNaturalist and human health included:

• This story on foraging as a tool for connecting people to nature by @naturesyear.
• This study on iNaturalist as a tool for monitoring human-mosquito interactions for public health.
• This study on iNaturalist for improving Chilean Hazelnut agriculture.

iNatters in the News

V. In California, don’t miss iNaturalist team members @kueda and @tiwane on Bay Nature: Ask the Naturalist.

W. We loved this story by @emilymstone on the humble but beautiful common butterwort.

X. In Bhutan, congratulations to @birkha for publishing “Butterflies of Tsirang”, a great example of leveraging the iNaturalist community to create urgently needed field resources.

Y. Check out this video where @charlespaxton shares using iNaturalist at the Black Bayou Lake National Wildlife Refuge.

Z. In Utah, @crothfels and @juliahobbie were quoted in this story on intermountain botanical forays with iNaturalist.

Thank you to everyone who participated on iNaturalist this July! You can become an iNaturalist supporter by clicking the link below:

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Publicado el 09 de agosto de 2024 por loarie