Maybe you've got some photos of an interesting mushroom sitting on your camera or smart phone from hiking last weekend. Maybe you've been out doing field work and snapped a photo of an unusual beetle while you were on your hands and knees marking plants you're going to follow all summer. Maybe you just love taking photos of flowers while you're out doing bird surveys.
What do you do with those photos? Nothing? Share them on Facebook? If that's the case, then... I think you should share them on iNaturalist.org, especially if they were observed between May 15 and 25 because anything observed during that time counts towards a Global Snapshot of Biodiversity for National Geographic's Great Nature Project ( http://greatnatureproject.org/events/global-snapshot-2015/map/). Maybe you're one of those people who doesn't get out in the field as much as you'd like, but you actually have a deep knowledge of the natural history of Appalachian salamanders. Maybe you learned all about scatterhoarding rodents of Brazil during your Masters but now you're sitting in front of your computer modeling resource competition in plankton. Maybe you know how to identify all of the spring ephemerals in Minnesota but now you're in grad school in Miami. If you want to put your identification skills to use, there's an awesome community that would love your help. iNaturalist has useful tools for sorting observations by place, taxonomic group, taxonomic rank, observation date, and more. Find your favorite place or group and dig in! http://www.inaturalist.org/observations When observations get identification agreement, then the record is also shared with GBIF (www.gbif.org). I think it's a great way to surface those incidental observations made during the course of your field work or other adventures that might result in a range extension or help provide data used for modeling. Some of you are probably working with these data now! Over the next couple of days, I'll be crunching the numbers on the observations for the Global Snapshot of Biodiversity. If you have anything to contribute from May 15-25, please upload them by MIDNIGHT on THURSDAY to get in the official tally. Check back to www.greatnatureproject.org for results, or better yet, create an account and we'll email you next week. I won't bother ecolog again for a while! Thanks, Carrie Seltzer --- Carrie E. Seltzer, Ph.D. Program Manager for the Great Nature Project www.greatnatureproject.org Education & Children's Media National Geographic Society 1145 17th Street, NW Washington, DC 20036-4688 202-862-8239 Click to tweet about the Great Nature Project <https://clicktotweet.com/4e75j>!
