in the outdoors CITIZEN SCIENTISTS iNaturalist invites everyone to track, identify the multitudes of earth’s creatures
and organisms
Story and photos by Scot Stewart “If you lose the power of wonder, you grow old, no matter how old you are. If you HAVE the power of wonder, you are forever young--the whole world is pristine and new and exciting.” - Sigurd Olson in “The Wilderness World of Sigurd F. Olson”
I
have written a few things, but only once before was it in the first person. I just haven’t. It seemed better to me that way. Citizen science, though, has caught me by the tail and it just seems different. When I watched an old video, yeah, a video on a VHS tape, recently about Sigurd Olson, one of my heroes, it just struck a note inside and helped me understand something driving me particularly hard this summer as I have been out photographing and putting my photos to work. Several years ago, a wise and good friend told me about iNaturalist, a citizen science website, developed by three Master’s students, to track sightings and
If you should come across an unknown creature, such as this ring-necked snake, a nocturnal creature found throughout much of the United States and parts of Canada, you can look up more information about it on the iNaturalist app.
sounds of literally all the Earth’s living organisms. Like many of the internet’s technological creatures, it took a little work to learn how to use it, and my short attention span soon left it. Last June, I took a second look and quickly decided I really liked it. It helped me identify the animals, plants, fungi, and other living things I was finding, but it also did something else, having a great effect on me. iNaturalist is set up for outdoor lovers, photographers, biologists, and others to post photographs or sound recordings of species they encounter to a website www. iNaturalist.com, with information about the location, date, and time of the find, in the discoverer’s account. Currently over 80,000,000 posts have been made by 1,800,000+ observers around the world. Nearly 100,000 new observations are being made daily. Summers in
the northern hemisphere probably produce a higher number of submissions than summers in the southern hemisphere just because there is more to report in the greater land mass with its summer activity of life, so it may slow in the winter months here. iNaturalist was created in 2008 at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information as a master’s degree Final Project. Currently it is managed by the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. “...an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature,” is how the site describes itself. It is an amazing place. I describe it this way because, to many of us, it seems more than just a website. The site is a place where anyone could post an image of an
October 2021
Marquette Monthly
33
