Signs of spring are here, but the weather sure doesn't feel like it! I was at the Arboretum on March 1 and hurried into the forest to seek cover from the bitterly cold wind. Immediately on the Upland Trail, I was greeted with a sound I haven’t heard in months: frogs! Tens of frogs were visible, floating on the surface of a vernal pool, and a huge smile spread across my face at this unexpected but unmistakable sign of spring. I took several photos, but I’m not an amphibian expert and none of the frogs were close enough for me to immediately know what species I was looking at. Previously, these photos would have been buried among the thousands of other photos on my hard drive, unidentified and inaccessible to everyone but me.
Now, however, I share my observations on a website called iNaturalist.org, a public online forum
where my local experience can be cross-checked by a community of fellow enthusiasts
and global experts. (Brief interlude: I’m giving a free talk and training on
iNaturalist on Sunday, March 10, at Adkins Arboretum, and I hope
you’ll join me.) Conceptually similar to eBird,
iNaturalist users can keep a list of all forms of biodiversity that they see
and where they see it. You can check which species occurs where (screenshot
below of the species that occur in Maryland – in order of observation
frequency), browse photos and Wikipedia descriptions, and filter the iNaturalist
database by location (e.g., all the observations
that have occurred in Caroline County) and/or species group (e.g., all the dragonfly
observations in Caroline County). Once the identification is confirmed
(more on that below), the observations are available globally for science,
including two major players: the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
I think the richest experience available through iNaturalist is
the community and ongoing conversation between amateur naturalists and
professional experts. The community helps confirm my identifications (essentially,
crowdsourcing data quality control), suggests new identifications when I’m
unsure of (or mistaken about) what I saw, and converts my photos into publicly
available data for science and conservation. Not only can I keep track of my
own observations, but I can peruse thousands of other people’s sightings,
submitted in real time from Akron to Afghanistan.
So, what happened to that early spring frog that I photographed
and posted to iNaturalist? Eleven minutes after I posted the observation, a
Vermont naturalist
confirmed my tentative identification of a wood frog (Lithobates sylvaticus), and an hour later, a DC-based naturalist
reported seeing a wood frog the day before in a stream.
I checked the frog species that are expected
to occur in the county based on range data (screenshot above), looked at
the entire continental distribution
of wood frogs (screenshot below) and provided a link to a fantastic calendar
of frog calls that I found by the Maryland Amphibian and Reptile Atlas. All
signs point to wood frog, my first 2013 amphibian! Again, I hope you will be
able to join me to learn more about iNaturalist at Adkins Arboretum on
Sunday, March 10, and to consider a new tool that links your local
experience in nature to a global community of enthusiasts and experts.
Matt Muir is a wildlife biologist and has recorded 1578 species on iNaturalist
(and counting!). He can be reached at muirmatthewj@gmail.com.
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