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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/citizen-scientists-fueling-biodiversity-research/>
"When Tom Doubleday walks in the Vermont woods, he turns over rocks looking for
salamanders. He listens for birdsong. He notices many of the plant species
around him.
So in July 2021, when the retired greenhouse worker with a lifelong interest in
nature came across a plant he didn’t recognize, about 12 inches tall with five
leaves radiating from the stem, he snapped a picture and uploaded it to the app
iNaturalist.
“I knew they were something unusual,” he says.
With the help of other users on the biodiversity platform, and confirmation
from Vermont state botanists in May 2022, it became clear that Doubleday had
stumbled upon the small whorled pogonia, a rare orchid thought to have been
extinct in Vermont since 1902.
iNaturalist is a convenient companion for nature lovers to identify plants and
wildlife while walking in the woods, climbing mountains or poking around in
tidal pools. But along the way, it has become something more — a valuable
repository where, simply by sharing their observations, citizen scientists are
helping to supply researchers with valuable data about the state of the
ecological world, from identifying rare plants to detecting the presence of
invasive insects to helping understand the complexities of the planet’s
biodiversity.
As the earth faces a precipitous decline in biodiversity — a 2019 United
Nations report estimated that up to one million species are at risk of
extinction — observations like these, recorded and logged by folks around the
world, have become critical to helping scientists understand what is happening
to ecosystems on the ground."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
