urban naturalist
Watching the Wildlife Biodiversity? There’s an app for that
O
n July 16 a female ruby-throated hummingbird drank from a coral honeysuckle flower at the edge of Tacony Creek Park. We know this because an iNaturalist user with the handle “digitalmirage” took a picture of the bird in the moment before it hummed away. “Recently I’ve been obsessed with hummingbirds,” explains Savannah McHale (a.k.a. digitalmirage), who grew up in Lancaster County and moved into a house neighboring the park this past spring. “As I kid I would see them for a split second and it would be a magical moment. Now, here we have five or six in the park that I observe every day and get to photograph.” Hummingbirds visit flowers all the time, and there is nothing new about humans photographing them. What is new is the ability to so easily share the observation on 10
GR IDPH IL LY.CO M
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by
bernard brown
a social media app and citizen-science platform like iNaturalist. iNaturalist is an initiative of the California Academy of Natural Sciences, together with the National Geographic Society. It boasts over 336,000 users, who have submitted more than 12 million observations of more than 175,000 species, since its launch in 2008. In Philadelphia nearly 700 iNaturalist users have submitted more than 10,000 observations of over 1,600 species. McHale’s hummingbird pic and other observation details were also captured by the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Biological Survey, a “project” on iNaturalist launched by the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership (TTF) to collect observations (about 5,400 so far) within the watershed. By documenting that hummingbird’s flower visit, knowledge of the ecology
of the watershed is growing as well as the community that supports it. “We know there are people who are into this, and we would like to transform them into leaders,” says Julie Slavet, TTF’s Executive Director, who cites Savannah and her husband, Tom McHale (“teemicail” on iNaturalist), as examples. TTF staff noticed the McHales’ observations on iNaturalist and reached out to get them involved in nature walks and restoration work. “We’re a watershed-wide organization,” says Slavet. “The city is downstream, the headwaters are upstream, and our job is to engage people all across the watershed, all different kinds of citizens in things that get them excited.” Slavet points out that the wildlife observations on iNaturalist can help animate the work of volunteers upstream in the suburbs. “This is a chance P HOTO G RAP HY BY SAVAN N AH MC HA LE