Forget Butterfly Nets; Today's Naturalists Capture Specimens on Phones
A smartphone app lets citizen scientists help professional scientists track changes in the natural world as urbanization, habitat loss, invasive species and climate change shake up ecosystems worldwide.
More than 100,000 users on all seven continents are snapping pictures of plants and animals they find and uploading the images using an app called iNaturalist. Those geotagged photos are giving researchers an unprecedented amount of information about what lives where, and how that's changing with humanity's expanding footprint.
In Arlington, Virginia's Barcroft Park, natural resources manager Alonso Abugattas spots a pair of snakes coiled underneath a plank.
"Northern brown, northern brown," he calls.
Another volunteer leans in with smartphone clicking. He uploads the photos to iNaturalist, where crowd sourcing soon confirms Abugattas' identification.
That observation, tagged by date, time and location, is now part of a growing database of nearly 5 million species finds all over the world.
“Everyone knows that if you want to protect something, you've got to know what you have,” Abugattas said.
Visitors to the iNaturalist website can search an annotated Google map for what lives in their neighborhood. Or search for where others have found a particular species.
The app came about as a collaboration between biologist and software developer Ken-ichi Ueda and environmental scientist Scott Loarie.
Loarie was studying methods to gather more data for wildlife conservation, while Ueda “was looking for a way to connect people to nature and find ways to use technology to get people excited about the outdoors,” Loarie said.
“That's one of the great things about citizen science. It achieves both those goals,” he said.
And it comes at an important time.
“Species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate,” he said. “We've only begun to understand exactly how those ecosystems contribute to our food system, or human health, all these things that we depend on.”
So far, iNaturalist data has been a part of studies on monarch butterflies, bats that may carry Ebola, and more.
