Intro to iNaturalist

Um, anyways, welcome everyone. I'm going to edit out all that fun beginning here. Um, today we're going to dive in. We're going to talk about iNaturalist. Um, uh, in their own words, they call it a powerful platform that connects people with nature and fosters a community of nature enthusiasts like you. Um, basically it's this this app um, and also a website effectively. It's it's a database um, that we can use to document what we're seeing around. So, I'm going to give some um, tips on how to use it, uh, best practices, things that I've learned, um, and essentially different ways that you can use it and get involved. Real quick, I need to I think I'm contractually obligated to put this slide in. Uh, um, if you're not aware of, you know, well, I hope you're aware of Maine Audubon since you found this program, but we are a member-based organization working to conserve Maine's wildlife and wildlife habitats. We can only do programs like this, um, or as I was talking about the birding basics series earlier, we had 650 people registered for birding basics this year, which is um, uh, a record for us. It's the the most people we've had, um, and being able to do these programs for free, or as I was talking about the evergreen walks that we've been doing, the um, excuse me, Evergreen Cemetery in Portland, we've been doing free walks there each morning for the last uh, two weeks. So, again, we can only do free programming like this with um, the support of our members. So, if you're not a member, please consider becoming one, or you know, maybe make a donation to help support some of this stuff. Um, next time you renew. I want to also make the plug that um, a couple years ago, so there there's some updates to this, but I put together this video. It's on YouTube. It's under Maine Audubon's YouTube channel that basically follows a very similar slide deck to what I'm going to cover tonight. So, I will be recording this. I'll send it out, but if you want a nice edited video that doesn't have all all of me stammering and the the ums, the uhs, the whatever. This is a nice we cut it down. It's I think just just over 10 minutes long that goes through everything that we are going to cover here. So, I'll send out this recording within a few days, but if you do want kind of a a nice shorter version, um we've also got it on on our in Maine Audubon's YouTube channel. As a quick outline of what I want to cover, really basic getting started with iNaturalist just quickly pointing out how to even like set up an account. Um this idea that you can contribute both through observations, but also helping out with identifications. That'll be a nice segue into this idea of essentially connecting with community, as we like to say. There's a lot of different ways that you can use iNaturalist or you can contribute to it. Um we'll talk about some specific conservation projects, especially here in Maine that are using iNaturalist right now and how you can contribute to them. And then uh at the end I I probably could have fitted in a a little differently, but I'll have just one or two slides to point out some what I'll call what I'll call responsible nature exploration. Just some some ethical considerations for what you're putting on here. Um and and some of the safeguards built into iNaturalist to make sure we're not, you know, potentially putting uh um any species at risk. So, even using something like this cool little uh Eastern Pine Elfin that I had just seen, that that video that was playing was um from a few years ago. I had encountered uh this little butterfly walking around on the in the parking lot at Maine Audubon's headquarters. And it you know, it's the classic uh I think of this as as whether you're intentionally contributing records to iNaturalist or even the casual, you know, as I said, walking out into Maine Audubon's parking lot and just noticing, you know, a neat butterfly that I don't see often and I wanted to be able to record that. And this at least gets us What you're looking at is a screenshot from the iNaturalist website, iNaturalist.org, after I had submitted this record. So, there's there's a bunch of things here that we will talk about kind of throughout the night, but the the three important pieces um might seem a little basic, you know, if you've done any uh projects like this collecting data. Uh I also uh I like mentioning, you know, this is the slide. We do a lot of school programs going, especially schools in the greater Portland area, teaching kids how to collect data. And you know, some of the the the key things here are going to be No, if the slide will advance. A species, knowing what uh we're talking about. There's a fun bit that iNat Using iNaturalist, you don't even necessarily need to know exactly what you're looking at. iNaturalist can help you identify it and then the community that uses iNaturalist can help you uh identify it as well. The date, uh critically important, um especially for some of the uh different ways that we'll see that the data gets presented here. And then a location. So, as long as you know the the when, the where, and the who, that is a a good record for um the iNaturalist database. I tried to for a number of slides on here, I try to do some screen recordings rather than trust my internet to play through this. So, uh I'm going to click play and try to narrate uh as we go over this. So, a fun thing, if I click on the species name of this record, it brings us to the whole Eastern Pine Elfin page. These are all the records. Um I think this is filtered for Maine. So, you can now see or this must be a greater area. Excuse me, it's North America. So, you can see the seasonal distribution on that chart. Scrolling down, we get a nice range map like this. And this is one of the, you know, wonderful things about a um whatever you want to call it, uh citizen science project. I know um community science is a phrase that's often used nowadays. Although, arguably community science is a slightly different thing. Um contributory science is is another phrase. The idea that we can all any person um in this case, you know, with access to a a phone or a computer can submit a a record here. And now we get these great distribution maps. I will point out this is this is showing individual occurrences. So, by knowing the the species, the date, uh and the location, that's what's going to put a little, you know, pin on the map here. I will I just want to be clear, especially I know I always relate things back to to eBird, especially if you were on our Birding Basics um series the last few months. We looked at a lot of eBird maps. Those maps used frequency, and that was the importance we talked about of having uh complete checklists in eBird of all the birds that were seen at that place at that time. So, important to just, you know, make that clarification that these are these You can filter these to look at um them seasonally, but we're not seeing um relative abundance uh compared uh across iNaturalist. That's more of a tip of the hat to uh to how eBird works. Um But, these are still very very valuable. The other thing I I want to mention before we go too far is what I would call almost like the the selfish side of iNaturalist, like what do you get out of it? Um Hopefully, the the motivation that you are contributing to these projects uh will be enough, but even if there is not like a specific project that people are using iNaturalist for, um it's amazing it's an amazing database that you can be putting records of any living thing you see. From insects to plants, uh fungus, you name it. Uh if it's living, it can go into iNaturalist. And again, even if there's not currently a project going on that is looking for these records, it never hurts to be collecting this data. Um Often times, uh you can you can, you know, kind of use iNaturalist to to get your um you know, your ideas started, if you want to think of it that way. What I'm showing on the screen here is so that's my username d hitchcock my life list is you know what it keeps for you. This is just in this tree view showing you know from the animals the the fungus the plants protozoans even down here. It's keeping track of you know everything that I've seen that I've submitted in here which from you know for the listers out there the people who like you know keeping track of this sort of thing like it's really cool that it it does this for you. Especially if you are you know if you are submitting your own photos of these it works amazingly well for being able to you know be a repository for your photos. I do want to quickly say I you know I basically use this for you know most of my wildlife photos. I know you know I want to be able to look up like my photos of a hairy neck tiger beetle. It's a lot easier for me to look in my account in iNaturalist and there's my you know a photo of one versus going through you know many hard drives that I've got floating around from you know somewhere in my office here. Some of the photos do get compressed a little bit so if you know if you are I would say a professional you know that's not what this is for there are plenty of other photo hosting websites like Flickr that are you know if you're just looking for a photo repository this isn't it but it's a really nice benefit of using it that it's going to you know keep track of all your photos you can filter that filter through them and um and it's just a you know I enjoy just kind of scrolling through and and see seeing the things I've seen. So that again I just threw this slide in to say there is, you know, almost you can probably think of a better word, but it's it's the selfish side, like for you. You can get a lot out of it, just yourself. Um as I said, let's do a really quick bit here on signing up, setting up an account, um because there's a couple ways that you might use iNaturalist. Um I'm going to kind of split the screen here. On the right side, you're going to be looking at just a a screen recording from uh my phone, looking at the the App Store, and then I'll quickly show what it looks like on the web, as well. Um iNaturalist is available on both iOS and Android, so just about any smartphone you have should be able to find it. Just search for the word iNaturalist. There are now a couple apps out from iNaturalist. I'll I'll show this on a on the next slide, but looking for the one that is now currently just called iNaturalist is the one that you'll want to be using. Um once you've got that downloaded, if it's your first time using it, it's going to have you it'll, you know, kind of walk you through what you're doing. At the same time, if you just go on a web browser and go to iNaturalist.org, when you click the sign up button, you do need to create an account to use this. Um any of these records we want linked to an observer, especially if there's ever going to be like questions about them, um knowing who is submitting them is is kind of just important, but just email, username, password. Um I will say, you know, there are these kind of funny questions. You do need to consent to iNaturalist to that they'll um you know, be be having access to some of your data, um don't worry about this, I guess is is maybe what I would say. Um in the many years that I've been using it, I've never received, you know, they are not here to spam us. This is These are the good guys. Um there are plenty of apps that do uh similar things um that aren't similar things in that they'll try to identify birds or birds, excuse me. You can tell I'm very bird-brained right now. That will help identify whatever you're trying to submit to it, um that I think are perhaps a little more uh nefarious. Here's the the one problem I'll quickly acknowledge. This is just a folder I have on on my phone where there are now three different apps out from iNaturalist. Uh some of the the screenshots I'm going to show are actually from this one that is now called iNat Classic, iNaturalist Classic. That was kind of their original app. They've done a really nice kind of updated version of it. It came out last spring, so just just about a year we've had it now. But I know I see a lot of people that still have iNaturalist Classic as it's now called on their phone, so uh maybe now is a good chance to make sure you have the newest version. Um it's all going to the same place. You can use both, but I will say the the new one is a bit slicker. They also came out with this app called Seek, which basically allowed you to use iNaturalist in real time. So, if you know what augmented reality is, it's that ability to like hold your phone uh with the camera open, and in real time the app would try to identify and and label whatever you are pointed at. So, the first iNaturalist app didn't do that. So, they came out with Seek so you could use this kind of augmented reality and just walk around and ID things. Now, that's built in. So, the new iNaturalist app kind of combines these two and it makes it just a lot sleeker. So, that's a long-winded way to say maybe make sure you're using the newest, most recent um app. But, uh depending on what you're using, this could look a little different um at various stages. So, let's talk about um uh as we say here, observations and identifications. Uh right when you first uh are going to launch the app to submit an observation, you know, ultimately trying to get to that that end screen that we were looking at a few minutes ago. On your phone, uh launch the iNaturalist app. This is going to show I just did a a screen recording this afternoon of me just stepped into my backyard, saw a little violet, and said, "I want to submit that." So. I'll launch iNaturalist. Down here, this little camera button is how you can just press that. This is that augmented reality view. You can see it's even coming up with an a a suggestion of a identification at the top, common blue violet. I snapped the picture. It'll do this little analysis. It jumped back to just the genus. Sorry, let me pause this for a second. When I uh after it thought and loaded, you can see it put it at just the genus level that it's that it's a violet. And it gives you this confidence index, which I really like that it does that. If you've ever used Merlin for identifying, you know, birds that are singing around you, um in the background, it's coming out with some sort of confidence interval. It wants it to hit a certain threshold before it's going to suggest a species for you. But, it doesn't show what that is. So, that's one of my favorite things about iNaturalist is that it does tell you how confident it is. When you scroll down to the bottom, notice there's a section that it says it might also be. So, it's doing this photo It's running this photo recognition software. It's also looking at observations that are nearby to where you are and coming up with these suggestions. So, common blue violet, that's the one that it was actually saying when we were looking at it through that augmented view. But, notice it says, sorry if this is really small on your screen. If you can't read that, it says 52.8% confidence. I'll click play again. You know, it comes up with some other violet species that it you know, we're down below 10% confidence. There, this is what it looks like if I select that one. You can now see that it's given it's showing that other confidence. By selecting the other one, it's now going to show some photos that you can compare looking at you know, important field marks like the shape of the leaves, how hairy the stems are, do the flowers match. So, I would say go with the confidence level that you feel confident with. If you can match it up with other um field marks. I guess it's not in this video, but there's also sometimes some text along with these. Sorry, here it is. Learn more about the species. We'll often go to it's pulling from a usually Wikipedia. I'll tell you about that one. In this case, um, I this was just a casual observation. I knew it was some sort of violet. So, I'm just going to go ahead and say, yeah, sure. Let's just use at that genus level. I can hit submit. And now it's going to sit there and wait for me to just click upload. Sometimes you'll want to wait till you're like on your home Wi-Fi to um to upload these, especially if you have quite a few. That's how you can do it in real time. I know another common question is how do you do these if you have photos that you've taken, if you're not using like iNaturalist at the time, if you've just been, you know, walking around through the woods, just casually snapping photos of things. You don't have to be doing this, again, in real time, uploading every single one as you go. So, instead of just clicking on the camera button, if you press and hold on it, you'll get this menu. That gives you the options to take one in real time, to open the ID in camera, that's what we were just looking at, that augmented reality view. You can upload sound recordings. I will say iNaturalist is not great for that, but they do allow it. Um, and then here's how you can also get to like your your photo, um, album on your phone. Uh, I shouldn't give them too much grief about sound recordings. So, maybe I'll give grief to the the users. Um, there are a lot of bad recordings on iNaturalist. So, I I don't think that they're uh, in the way that it can give a good suggestion of what you have a photo of, it doesn't often give a good suggestion of what you're recording. I'll mention down here it does say create observation with no evidence. This is a key part of iNaturalist is that they do they're basically looking for what I would call like that that voucher, whether it's a photo, maybe a um maybe a sound recording, something that's verifiable for what you saw. They do have this option that you can create an observation with no evidence. You didn't get a photo, um didn't get a recording. I've had some species like um the first Canada lynx I ever saw was one just crossed the road. Couldn't, you know, I was driving, wasn't going to take a photo. Um but boy, did I want like that record. Uh I wanted to keep track of it for myself. I wanted it, you know, if someone wanted to know if if, you know, a state biologist was curious. I thought that was still important to get that documented despite the fact that I couldn't prove it per se. So, you can still submit observations, as they say, with no evidence. Um that does exist there. But as we'll see, it might not get up to kind of the a higher standard uh that we're looking for with these records. Let me click play just to show you that if we do upload photos, I think you'll get to see my camera roll and a picture. Let me jump ahead. There we go. I was going to say. There's a cute picture of my cat up above, but we jumped past it. So, I'll select that this bird we saw this morning on the bird walk. And guess what? With 93% confidence, it said that that was a scarlet tanager. The other suggestion, um which is fun to see, it says at 4% confident that it was an American goldfinch. Uh oh, just over 1% that it was a Western Tanager, but sure enough, it was this nice female Scarlet Tanager. And I bet like if it wasn't straight on, um or if I had cropped it a little bit more, we probably it probably would have been more confident. But fun to see, that's, you know, a nice easy way. Click save, and now your observations are in iNaturalist. It's, I think, a lot easier than uh than Well, having done these courses a lot of times, um I think it's easier than most people think. Especially if you're coming from an eBird background. Um eBird, which, as we said, you know, it wants a complete list of everything that was there. Are you sure you're reporting everything you saw? It wants to know how many of everything you saw. Um eBird wants a lot from you. iNaturalist wants to know what you saw, when, and where. And that makes it pretty easy to use. I almost pulled this next slide out, um because it's it's kind of uh it's a funny outdated number now. Um this was a blog post. This was a few years ago, uh where they were celebrating This was into 2023, I guess. Um Fun to see kind of the the growth here. Uh you can see this is the number of observations um per month uh plotted out um since since iNaturalist started. And you can really see this adoption now. It's fun to see also the seasonal influence. Uh of course, a lot of people are getting out in the well, in the the northern hemisphere in the spring. You can certainly see the bias to um who's using iNaturalist, or or I should say who who has the free time um to be logging uh observations like this. Some fun numbers from here in Maine. The first time I did this slide deck, I guess it was back August 2023, Maine had just 642,000 observations. Pretty impressive. I thought it was really impressive that it was up to 762,000 by um less than a year later. This was March of 2024. And fast forward a couple years, we're now over a million observations, 1.2 million observations just in the state of Maine covering 13,000 different species. Again, this is from, you know, any living thing being reported, but that is a just awesome number. These other two are what we'll kind of talk about um coming up here is these are the number of observers, so people submitting these records. But a really great thing of iNaturalist is that you can also just be an identifier. You can help identify um and uh yeah. Up. What am I trying to say? You can help um confirm what people are are submitting. Oop, sorry. This was just going to be one more example. Um just to be clear, to show how easy this is, launch your camera. This is actually This is from the iNaturalist classic. Um so, observe something. Uh there was one bit of extra credit that I wanted to show in here. Um photograph it. Upload your photo. So, a little clunkier compared to the newer app. It's going to load some suggestions. Again, these would Remember, these would be listed at the bottom of the the newer version of the app. Important to compare some of your options. In this case, another one that I was just looking at my in my garden dock. Which is a good host plant for um bronzed copper, one of my favorite butterflies that we have in Maine. They um they use dock as a host plant. Even the non-native dock they'll they'll use. Um which is a species that's just kind of disappearing really quickly. Um but that it's not as bright and beautiful as a monarch, so people don't seem to care as much. Everyone wants to plant milkweed. No one wants to plant dock. Um unfortunately. Uh then select your ID. And the last thing I was going to show is that you can add multiple observation multiple photos. So, I would say I would call this extra credit if you want to go in and start adding, you know, that first photo is good for telling that it was a a dock. The second photo with a closer look at the leaves, those big broad leaves, is going to be helpful for telling that it's broadleaf dock. So, I know a lot of lot of observations in iNaturalist just get that um a single photo to go with it. But for especially for plants, um even birds at different angles it can be really important or really helpful to have multiple photos. Here's three examples. Um again, walking around my yard. This is um couple years ago in the summer. I wanted to show basically varying degrees of of difficulty. Um this first one, oops, it'll start playing a pretty distinctive plant. Folks might recognize it. We'll let it do its little loading suggestions here. Helps that it's very distinctive. It is the um common or I know it as spotted jewelweed, one of the um touch-me-nots. Um, very distinctive plant, you know, those those leaves um not much you're going to mistake it for. Now, here's a fun one. Um, great that it got that, you know, it did say it's pretty sure it's in the genus Impatiens. Yep, definitely and I know that it was um spotted. This next one, um again, if you're a gardener, you'll probably know that um recognize the leaves here, but it's a fun one when we take a look at, you know, pulls my Sorry if I didn't say this before. A really fun thing Let me go back 1 second. A really fun thing about using the app is that your phone knows exactly where you are and when. So, you don't even really need to collect that data. Your phone's going to do that for you. As long as you're snapping a photo, iNaturalist knows. Let me just fast forward this. Here's the funny answer. So, these were daylilies growing in my garden. Um, it gets that and you know, that's the one that I would pick here. But, notice some of the other options. There's this daylily leaf miner. So, this is an insect that bores that that's a leaf miner, so it's going to be mining. It's going to be boring in through these leaves. And it's funny, I didn't notice that you know, I didn't see any of them actually in uh uh in the leaves here, but it's a funny bit to realize when you're using a photo recognition software, you know, it's it doesn't know the difference between a a leaf miner and a daylily, but it certainly knows that they they look the same. That's how people are are uploading these. Here's another fun one. What happens if you've just taken up close picture of some bark on a tree? Let's take a look at what suggestions it loads. And kind of funny here. It does suggest some trees, uh black oak, red oak. The funny thing is this is actually a sugar maple. Um so it didn't even get that and didn't, you know, get an a maple right. This is where photographing things like the leaves are going to be a lot more helpful or even kind of taking a step back so you can you can actually see like the patterns in the bark might be more helpful. Another funny one. If we look at uh uh the other suggestions, so uh spongy moth, the new name um of this invasive species. Spongy moth, guess what they are often photographed on? Tree bark. So, the way that uh photo recognition software works is often, as we said, not looking at like the individual species, but I bet almost every photo of a spongy moth, unless it's sitting up against like a white sheet or something that it's been attracted to at night, it's probably sitting up against bark. And that's a good thing to know is one of the problems with um photo recognition software. Especially fun to look down, uh yellow-bellied sapsucker is also listed as an option here. You might say that doesn't look anything like a yellow-bellied sapsucker, but you get the two points of sapsucker photos are often taken with them part you know, sitting up against the tree or if someone's uploading photos of sap wells. So, you don't even see the bird, but all those sap well photos are going to have the sap wells sorry that um are what the sapsucker would be drilling into the tree to create the sap that they'll come back um insects will be attracted to it etc. Um so I just you know, random examples here, but I think these are important to realize that it's doing its best to come up with a suggestion, but it can sometimes give you some pretty wonky things. And I know from from uh reviewing iNaturalist records, from reviewing eBird records as as people you know, become seemingly increasingly dependent on Merlin a lot of people put a lot of faith in these um uh typically AI generated uh identifications and this is my quick encouragement to you to still use your critical thinking skills and don't just blindly accept what it's uh suggesting suggesting here. It will be wrong um but this is where the community comes in. Natural transition, am I right? And this idea of connecting with community in iNaturalist there's some really um uh fun ways that this works. I'll show you again just a screen recording. This is me going on to iNaturalist.org. Once you have an account you're submitting sightings uh you can start following people. I love following Herb Wilson. Um he is great um uh uh What am I looking for? Lepidopterist? Um always out, you know, finding cool butterflies and things. Sorry. When I open this site, you'll notice there's this little notification in the top right, and here are three observations of mine that people have helped identify. This was Weston Barker. I uploaded this record. It always jumps to the the new record. But here it's showing this was a margin tiger beetle, also called salt marsh tiger beetle, that I had submitted. And notice now underneath my as it says suggested ID, there are two other people that have also said margin tiger beetle. And what that gets us to is this up here where it says research grade. iNaturalist, the database wants what they call these research grade records where you have at least a two-thirds majority of people agreeing on what that observation is of. You're not going to get that two-thirds um level for those records as we talked about that that might only have um like a single or or no photo. This is why you need the evidence for people to confirm and look at. Just to quickly show on the app, again this is the older version of the app, but there is a section where you can see um your content and people uh as they agree with your IDs as well. You can comment, you can um change the the identification. This is the really one of the really cool parts of iNaturalist. Just to show some Well, excuse me. Show some examples. Um this was a a fritillary, some butterfly. I was way up um we were doing surveys for the main bird atlas. Uh while being up in kind of remote areas, you can see we're near the Saint John River up here in Aroostook County. Um I knew not many people were going to be, you know, looking for or or, you know, doing much um collecting of data up there. We were there looking for for birds, but I figured I would, you know, get some butterflies as well. I submitted this just as as a fritillary. I didn't know which one, one of the big ones. Um guessed the genus here. Um and there's Herb, as I mentioned before. He certainly knows his butterflies better than I do. Sorry, trying to advance. This is just a a blowing that up so you can see it a little better. So, Herb suggested that it was actually Atlantis Fritillary and wrote some great comments. He says, "Black spot present on forewing on outer part of central darker area also present in Aphrodite, but not in great spangled. Dark wing margins separate this species from Aphrodite. Blue eyes also good mark for Atlantis. The eyes in Aphrodite and greater spangled are yellow-green." I said, "Thanks." And I changed my my identification to also be Atlantis. And then here's uh Bill Sheehan, great um birder naturalist from Aroostook County. Also um put it in as Atlantis Fritillary. And now you get see it gets that tag as being research-grade. As people um uh you'll you'll see this on each page. It'll even tell you who the top identifiers are of uh any species that you're you're putting in here. Um and it can be really fun when you start realizing like some of these are are truly like world-class experts in some of the species that that are showing up here. You can get to do this, too. If you just go into iNaturalist and click on explore, one thing I love doing is I'll just filter down to Maine. And then I filter to just birds. There's one thing I feel confident in is that I can identify birds. So, I can go through here are, you know, recent observations. Someone uploaded this photo, probably using the app, and it just said it was something in the genus Larus, one of the large white-headed gulls. I look at that and I say, "Well, that's a juvenile ring-billed gull." So, I can suggest that here. And then when I click done, it suggests that, and since it's higher than that uh what they had put in, there you can see it changes to ring-billed gull. It still needs an ID. Let me pull that back 1 second. It still says need needs ID because we don't have 2/3 of the people all um or 2/3 of the IDs agreeing yet. And this is where that observer, they could change theirs to to agree with ring-billed gull and get it up to research grade, or if someone else also voted for ring-billed gull, that would get it up to research grade. Another fun example. I can click on this one. They've submitted as a a mallard, but since no one else has done it yet, I can just click agree. Got the white on the tail, looks good. And notice after I click agree, it changes over to research grade. And now that's going to show up on the maps and be exactly what we want in iNaturalist. I think I've one more example here of what happens if you disagree with something. Scrolling through, here's a great cormorant. In August, not too common in Portland. All right, let me slow down a second. Well, we'll look at it. There's the cormorant. Looking at it, that color on the throat looks more orange than yellow. That's one way to tell them apart. So, I'm going to go back to this record and I'm going to suggest an ID. And to me it looks like double-crested cormorant. I find that from the drop-down. And I always encourage you to if especially if you're disagreeing, then say why. So, I wrote, "The orange gular pouch better for double-crested, yellow, and great." I'll hit done. Now, when it uploads here or or updates, notice it still says needs ID and it's bumped it down, despite me putting in the species, since my suggestion of a species differs from the other species suggested. You can see that in the top here it switches over to just the family level, cuz that's that's at least what we've agreed upon is that it's within Phalacrocoracidae, uh the family. Now, if other if someone else comes in and agrees with double-crested cormorant, there's our two-thirds and that would get it up to a um it would turn it to double-crested and it would get it to that that research grade we're looking for. Couple of their fun or funny examples. Here is um Oh, there's Talk about There is a funny story about how this uh fun critter ended up um Real quick, someone This was years ago. They brought in uh this barred owl that unfortunately been hit by a car. They found it on the side of the road in the winter. When they brought it inside, um we had it on a table. We were um discussing it, getting the information. May not Audubon has the permits to be able to um accept specimens like that. Um we use them for educational purposes. While we were watching the barred owl dead on the table, it started to move. Uh the feathers um on its chest started to move a little bit, and out came this fly, this louse fly. Um They're these really like kind of flat-bodied, perfect for wedging themselves like in between uh the feathers, um especially on birds. I only knew of it as some sort of bird, you know, as I'm typing it into iNaturalist, I type in bird louse fly, and, you know, seems good enough to me. And that um well, older than 6 years ago at this point, that was back in uh February of 20 uh 17. I put this in. And funny that What you can see is someone very quickly agreed with me, bumped it up to uh you know, it would have been a research grade uh um record there. But then almost 7 years later, someone who probably knew a bit more about uh louse flies, they put in this suggestion at just the family level, and pointed out that the species that that I had picked, and I think I had picked it probably from some the from either being swayed by the name or whatever the the AI suggested at the time. They pointed out that it's a it's a palearctic species. It's an old world louse fly. So, not one that was here. It bumped it down to a different level, and then um uh almost a year later, here someone um did get it uh I guess agreeing with that with a family level again. So, sometimes it can take a while. It can be um I don't want to say discouraging, but sometimes you'll you'll submit some observations that uh it might take again um months. In this case, it took years to get this, you know, at least into the right family. Um it's still I don't think it's it's at research grade record right now. But, it's in there, and I I do like to say, you know, um that's in there for all time, and as people start, you know, studying louse flies a little more, um maybe someone can figure out like which species it is. All right. Um I want to talk about some more specific projects. Uh again, we've we've just been talking about how you can just get your observations in here, but sometimes having a little bit more purpose. Um Sorry, you keep getting my my tiger beetle photos. Quick plug. I I should have written down the date. I'm going to do a whole talk on tiger beetles, I think, in another month or so here. These have become my favorites uh beetles uh in in Maine. We've got some really cool ones with some really uh amazing kind of natural history and and everything. So, if you've never seen a tiger beetle before, you're going to start finding them as you're out looking around, especially out birding and they're pretty cool. Here's a fun, um, story I want to tell. Uh, this was a photo that I had, uh, taken out in my parents' backyard when I was growing up. I'm sure you can't read that. It says July of 2012 out in Hollis, Maine. Um, I I knew that it was still that date because of, you know, the the metadata in the photo. Um, I'd been going through these. I submitted it 4 years later, so September of 2016, which I think is a good point to make. You don't have to be, you know, finding this stuff, um, immediately submitting it from your phone. If you've got, you know, if you know the date, the location, and you can let iNaturalist identify it for you, you can submit any records you want. So, this one I had uploaded in, um, in 2016 from 4 years earlier. Um, it was this ribbon snake that, you know, I think it was the only one I had photographed at the time, so wanted to put it in iNaturalist. Now, here's one of the fun things about this. Uh, Trevor Persons, who's a herpetologist, um, sends me this email and says, "Hey, you know, we'd love to use this for the Maine Amphibian and Reptile um, because it was the first record that they had of one in the town of Hollis. Awesome. Even cooler, some years later, uh, now 2021, uh, in Standish, we were doing it this was some bird atlas work, too. Saw another ribbon snake and here is just, you know, quick shot I took with my cell phone. You can barely see it, um, in there, but good enough to ID. And same thing, got another email right away from Trevor saying, you know, that it upgrades Standish to a photo record. They had a record before, but no um documentation to go with it. Why I think this is all so fun and so cool, if you've been, you know, following the um the real important news out there, is that we now have the third edition of the Maine Amphibians and Reptiles book available at your local Maine Audubon Nature Center. Quick plug there. But one of the along with the great species accounts that are in there are the updated maps from that project. And really fun to see like um Uh where is it? Standish and Hollis are going to be like down here, I guess. Um you know, there's my records that I put in iNaturalist now getting used to to update the distribution maps of these um uh species in this book, which is, you know, a fun way to get to see this stuff used. Picking a random um uh frog that I had seen. Um this was another one while out atlasing way up in New Portland. Um found this green frog. I do like to point this one out because you might say like, uh a green frog, like they're a common species, they're all over the place. But it's fun when you start looking at the map and realizing like if you're not going to be the one to report it, like maybe no one else is. Um there I put the record in. We've got people agreeing that it's a green frog. And then scrolling down, we haven't talked about all these things. You can annotate your your um records to say if it was alive or dead. Um the what life stage it was in. But there's a section called projects. And this is how a lot of these projects, like the main amphibian and reptile project, um how you can directly contribute to them. Some of them are set up like this project that if you submit a record of a um an a amphibian um an amphibian or reptile in Maine, it knows it knows what species they are looking for and what geography geographic area they're looking for. So, any of those records are automatically going to get pulled into this. This is how almost every project works now. Here's the amphibian reptile. This is uh older screenshots, so I'm sure they're well over this now, but just by doing this they've got oh you know, over 20,000 records as I said. This is a couple years old since I updated this, but that's what they uh that's the primary way they're now getting records into um the survey. I really want to make a plug for current project. We've got the the reptiles and amphibians book with the third edition just came out, but the most recent um statewide survey that the state's doing uh I should also plug the the main bird atlas. We used eBird for that. Um is getting published this year. I we don't have the official date, but August it should be in our hands, and I um having been one of one of the authors on that and the outreach coordinator for all those years, um I cannot wait to see that come um you know, to to a solid state, I'll call it. Uh anyways, I want to make the plug for flower flies. The the state's now um is it 2 years into uh this project, and it's amazing. You know, I wouldn't have thought that they would have you know, almost 12,000 observations at this point. Um I remember when they announced that I said, "Oh my god, who who's going to look at flower flies?" But sure enough, they've got, you know, almost 1,400 uh volunteers that are submitting observations here. And it's so easy. Use iNaturalist, spot something, spot a um you know, any of the the flower flies, uh hover flies, uh Syrphidae, uh love Latin. And that'll get your observation into this. This is one that I love to point out. I don't know flower flies at all. I bought the There's a book about um flower flies of Northeastern United States. And it's horrible. There are so many that look identical. I just don't care. But I can get good enough photos and upload them here. And then people on this project, usually within a day, are figuring out what species it is and updating those observations, which is great. I'll quickly plug a bunch of Maine Audubon sanctuaries. Um they should all be set up now, but we're trying to collect, you know, passively collect um data on what uh what you can find at all of our uh different sanctuaries. Scarborough Marsh, we've been doing bioblitz uh each summer, gosh, for probably 15 years now. And it's really fun to see this is this is just a little stretch of the um the nature center going down Route 1 along the nature trail that we have there. And again, this is just from having volunteers come out on a couple days each summer, um we now have hundreds of observations. So, here are a couple photos from it Um I think 2 years ago. I want to make the plug um we're going to have some outings associated with this. Um the ones at Gilsland Farm are we're going to extend them and do a couple throughout the summer, but the one that was scheduled for the 13th, that was going to be tomorrow um after late afternoon does need to be postponed. Um the person who was going to leave that leave that is is just out right now. So, stay tuned. You still can um sign up and get notifications for the the new dates for that. And then I want to make the plug that if you're up in the greater uh Bangor area near our our Nature Center at Fields Pond in Holden um we want to do the another this will be, you know, field-based rather than just me talking to you on Zoom. These will uh be a great opportunity to come to our sanctuaries and and, you know, whip out your phone or bring your camera and collect some observations and get help from the naturalist there. Um but I want to make the quick plug there's only one person signed up for the Fields Pond one right now. Um especially giving uh Nathaniel, you know, the um the motivation. Uh let's if if you want to do it, please sign up now so we know kind of how many people to expect. That would be super helpful. As I mentioned at the beginning, I have just like two slides uh cuz I want to make this point about kind of responsible nature exploration, as we'll call it here. Some of these more vulnerable species that you might think um that you wouldn't want to submit to a public database. Uh but I'll show you um some things in place here that that kind of make it fine. One example here is New England Cottontail. This is a endangered species. There are a few places, especially on the southern coast that you can go find them. Not to be confused with Eastern Cottontail, the non-native Cottontail that's now taking over southern Maine, at least in the greater Portland area. That's a a big problem that's getting out of control. It's incredible to me how many Eastern Cottontails are now, especially on the peninsula in Portland. Out of control. Especially the the concern is that they're going to push our New England Cottontails out of their habitat. Um potentially even hybridize, maybe, but big problem for New England Cottontails. They need all the protections that they can get. Because they are an endangered species, when you submit an observation to iNaturalist, instead of showing an exact pin on the map, you'll be able to see where you saw it. But, if you can see, I might not have pointed this out before. The the little orange dots on the map here are other observations that people have submitted. And it shows them as being imprecise. It doesn't show you exactly where. It's getting, you know, it's fairly close. If you know the habitat, if you know, you know, I'll spoil this one. Laudholm Farm, they've been doing a lot of work in releasing New England Cottontails there. So, they tend to be very tame, and and that's where you can actually see them if you ever want to see a really cool mammal. Um so, I bet all of these are probably from Laudholm Farm. But, interesting, you know, how obscured they're shown. Um here's just another kind of view of that. So, uh again, I I appreciate Sorry, this was that's what the difference is. Here's me logged into my account, so I can see my pin. If you were to try and look up this observation, here's what it shows. Basically just this um uh what is that? Probably 15 km squared uh where it was seen. It will not show the exact location. So, there's a number of um mammals like this. There's especially a lot of plants. Some uh threatened or endangered uh plants in the state that I know um people don't want the exact location being shared of, but because these statuses are built into iNaturalist, a lot of them get automatically obscured. Keep that in mind. There might be some things that you say, you know, that don't have a a endangered species status, and you might you might know, you know, that it's something that shouldn't be um shared at that level, and you can manually go in and obscure the location. You can um I think it often will just show at the state level if you obscure it. You'll probably get contacted by someone, you know, some biologist who will ask you um to share that with their project or, you know, where exactly it was. Every New England cottontail I've submitted to iNaturalist, I've had um Who was it? Corey Sterns, uh biologist with IFW, reach out and just say like, "Hey, can you confirm where that was?" Um and it's almost always where where they know they are. Um that was me talking for a long time. I'm going to pause now cuz that's my last slide. Um happy to take questions. And there's one thing I really want to emphasize, it's that you kind of can't break iNaturalist. Um especially Let me click back here. I love, you know, kind of calling myself out. Like here is this was sloppy of me. I should have picked a better, you know, a higher taxa or something. But I knew, you know, it was a louse fly I found on a bird. And just to you know, drive this point home, like eventually we got it kind of straightened out for the most part. I should go back in now and probably agree with this this higher like family level identification. But I I think as well, as humans, maybe, we always get really caught up on this this species level classification for for records, but um especially well, at least as birders, we do. Um especially when you're looking at insects, a lot of them you're you're not going to be able to get down to a a species level. Um at least not with you know, most of the photos that we're going to be able to capture. So, I think getting to, you know, a family, a genus, um uh should be encouraged a bit more. And I really like that iNaturalist does have it um at least a lot more prominently than than eBird seems to encourage. I'll bet there's some probably specific questions folks have um especially if you've used iNaturalist yourself. Um I think what I'll do here is maybe stop screen sharing. I can't see other people's video when I have the screen sharing on so um I can pull this back back up if needed. But how do people feel? You're going to download iNaturalist? You're going to go out? And there's a fun bit of start with your backyard. Nice. I see a lot of thumbs up emojis. That's like This is the fun part of doing Zoom presentations is um you can't read the room if you know what I mean. Um I would encourage you to download it and just go right in your backyard and especially start with things that you know. If there's a red maple tree in your backyard and you know it's red maple because you see those leaves, you know how to identify them, you know, or flowers that you've planted. It doesn't at all, you know, you can put um uh cultivars and you know, anything that you can identify. Start with those cuz I think it'll give you a little more faith in knowing like what you're assigning an identification to. Um then start going out on you know a trail. Uh start you know, start exploring a little bit and when you see something you don't know what it is open that app, turn on you know, use its little augmented reality AI camera um whatever. We use the word we we call too much stuff AI when it's not now. It's most it's such a like sales pitch. It's photo recognition software. It's been around for longer much longer than you know, the what we the transformer models that we now like talk about with all of these chat GPT and thing. So, then start um testing it. See if you can find, you know, something that's new to you. See if you can match that ID and even if you can't, submit the things you don't know because you're going to see the awesome community that is iNaturalist will start suggesting IDs to you. Um it's really fun. Uh what am I up to now? I've got over a thousand observations that I've put in and almost every time, every day, I should say, when I log into iNaturalist, there's a new notification. Someone has suggested an ID. They've they have agreed with an ID. Um you can always tell when someone's like doing research on something because uh it was about a month ago. Uh I think it was every black swallowtail record I had submitted like the same person went through like years and years worth of observations and they were like confirming them all. Um and I bet that they're just trying to get them all to research grade before, you know, there's probably some paper or something being worked on with black swallowtails. Um or to someone who had a bunch of free time. And they love their black swallowtails. Um I don't know, but that's that's one of the awesome things about um uh contributory science, whatever we want to call it. I think uh if there's no feel free to drop any questions in the chat, otherwise I'll ramble for 10 more seconds. As I say, there's you know, an encouragement for folks is that we're, you know, whatever motivations we have, I think this is one of the best ways that we can kind of give back to nature. However, um however it might end up being used, you know, I think um I think as knowledgeable observers, especially if you've spent an hour listening to me ramble about using iNaturalist, like go use it. You can't break it. Um can you hear me, Doug? And even if you get something wrong. Yeah, Matthew, go ahead. It looks like there's a number of questions. Can you see the chat? I have the chat open. I don't see Oh, I see what's happening. Sorry, someone sent me a direct message, so I was only seeing that. Um I didn't see anything in the chat. Wow, let me Hm. Again, don't you love iNat love Zoom. Sorry, let me read these. Um I should have been at least Wow, I need to scroll way up. Um All right, this will take a second. Uh app has a white background is the correct app. Yes, um if if your if your app looked a little different than my app, it could just be the light mode versus dark mode on your phone. As long as it's called iNaturalist, it's probably right. Um Sapsuckers, yes. Uh are the counts just for Maine? How do you set it up to just count Maine? Um I bet that was showing when we were looking at when we were doing I see it was from 7:30. Sorry, I didn't see that 15 minutes ago. Um We were probably looking at like the overview. So, when you go to inaturalist.org, click on explore, you can filter those down to um whatever region you want. That's how I was getting like the number um that we pulled there. I hope that's what you're asking about. Um Toby asked about invasives. You can submit anything you want, any living thing. Um it's even uh there's a number of projects. We were using this to help map out uh phragmites. Um the invasive reed uh around the Scarborough Marsh. Um Uh let's see. So, yeah. You can submit invasives. Um Tom and Ann asked, "Is there any way to input past eBird sightings into iNaturalist as a data dump or do you have in to input one by one?" Um I'll give two answers here. You have As far as I know, you have to go one by one. But, I would also encourage not to because um iNaturalist and eBird ultimately are those two databases are both getting put into a larger database called um GBIF. Uh what is that? The global biodiversity something something. Um That's the That is the big repository for all all these projects everywhere. And I'm sure people would know whoever's going to pull from that would be able to see that there's duplicates. But, it doesn't help. Um I guess it would only be for your numbers. Um, Carol, thumbs up. Better to do family level and let the community narrow it down. Um, I submitted a bird a couple months ago thinking it was leucistic goldfinch and didn't get a hit. Um, should I resubmit? Um, Linda, uh, with that bird, I would give it time. I'm I'm surprised I didn't see it. Uh, now I'm going to go look for a that um, finch. Um, resubmit and edit it to just bird. I guess the one thing I would say is always is getting it at least into, um, >> [sighs] >> what would I call it? Um, you can put it in as a bird. If you can get it to like the the order or family, then I know, you know, that's where you're going to get people looking a lot more. I see a lot of people that if you don't add an ID at all, uh, what is it iNaturalist calls it like something. It'll It's literally like just any, you know, it's something. It's just in there. And a lot of those records just don't get seen because no one's looking for them. Like, there's this one guy that just loves tiger beetles. So, every tiger beetle anywhere in the world, he's IDing as soon as it gets put in as a anything in tiger beetles. But, I'm sure he's probably not seeing tiger beetles that are just getting put in as like insect. Um, cuz he's not, you know, probably not. I don't know I don't know how much free time he has. So, yeah, get it I would say get it as specific as you can. And that is kind of the nice thing with iNaturalist is like it's it doesn't hurt to be wrong. I was wrong with that Laos fly, um, for 6 years. Before it got corrected, so. Yeah, especially if you're not getting it. Suggested ID from someone else, and especially a bird. Sorry, I'm going to keep looking at the chat here. Thanks, downloaded, used it. Yeah, get back into it. Going to try it tomorrow, awesome. Had the app. Yeah, Toby, I've had the app since 2022 and don't see any observations, just start new. Yeah. Especially, you know. If you want to try to like if you had an older account and want to try to find it, but. I would say start a new, it might be easier. Got people updating. Delete iNaturalist classic and just download. Core asked about deleting iNaturalist classic. You know, I there's something about it that I like I keep it on my phone just in case. Then, you know. I know it works and sometimes the new ones, you know. There might be some bugs, so. One answer is yes, go ahead and delete it. Like the new one is supposed to be the better one that we should all be using. But at the same time. If it's not broke. Why get rid of it? Thanks, so. Use the program online without the app. I so if I do a trip, sorry the question was about using the program online without using the app. If I go on a trip like for main Audubon we did a tour to Jamaica back in March and I was taking tons of photos of um butterflies, lizards, flowers, um all sorts of stuff. And I wasn't taking them on my phone. I had a big camera. So, I had dozens of pictures. I knew the location. I knew the date. And those um it was easier to drag and drop all those photos into iNaturalist. I know we didn't show this because it's like it's probably how less than 1% of the records get submitted. You can just drop a bunch of photos at once, and then one at a time you like click on a map where it was, then you click and it'll suggest an ID. So, there are other ways to do it. Um I just didn't show it because I know it's it's it's not how most people do it. It's not a great answer, but um try it out. It's It is very easy. It's just there's an upload button right on the iNaturalist page. You just drop a photo in, and then it just asks you to zoom in on a map. The one thing that a neat thing is that it'll give you this little circle um when you click, and then you can adjust the size of the circle with like how certain you are um about uh where it is. Yeah, if you don't have a a photo and just put in photo uh a phone and just put in photos like I actually like I kind of prefer doing it that way sometimes because I like taking I like uploading the photos I take with my big camera cuz they come out nicer. And the you know, the cell phone I just I use for like the oh, I want to document this. Oh, a ribbon snake. Like got it. Um But I Yeah, I like using it. The other eye. Uh so do you use iNaturalist for everything but birds? Yes, uh Tom and Anne asking. Uh yeah, I haven't put any bird records into iNaturalist because that's what I'm using eBird for. Um knowing that they're ultimately getting into the same database, it just doesn't um it doesn't need to. The the I guess the one exception eBird doesn't want you to submit records of dead birds uh because it really skews uh detection rates. Um or things like tracks. Um tracks and signs. So like if you said if you saw, you know What would be a good example? Um You're on a hike in the winter and you see, you know, grouse tracks. A ruffed grouse walked through the snow. And you you didn't get to see the ruffed grouse, so you can't submit it to eBird, but you still want to be able to like re record that you saw it. iNaturalist lets you submit tracks and signs. That's like when we talked about the sapsucker wells, you can submit that um to iNaturalist. In the same way, you know, um a roadkill bird or a window strike, um something like that, you can submit deceased uh birds or animals or you know, whatever, to iNaturalist. Um eBird doesn't want that. So that's the exception. That's when I'll use iNaturalist for bird stuff. Good question. Um I want to use it in my plants I'm trying to rewild. Nice. Any tips on how to ID random plants? Yeah. Use iNaturalist and see what it randomly um tells you. And I'd say, you know, remember back to the example where I was showing like the the distinctive plant versus like just the leaves and then the bark. Like that's where I would say um taking a few photos of like I usually take like a photo of the entire plant. Then I'll try to single get like a single leaf. Especially like a basal leaf, like when growing from like down near the um the bottom of the plant um or anything that looks unique on it. And that's a nice thing again in iNaturalist. It doesn't have to just be one photo. You can upload, you know, four photos to go with um any observation. Four, 10, whatever. There's There's probably a limit at some point, but um and then someone somewhere is probably going to help identify it. Um Yeah. Sweet. Thanks. Ah, Matthew, good one. A a basal, b a s a l, not b a s i l, leaf. Haha. We love a good pun. Um that said I started the day with a bird walk 13 hours ago. Um I'm impressed my brain got through this one. I'm glad we're not doing the gull ID talk tonight. That one would have fried my brain. Um and that said in 11 hours, we can go do a bird walk again at Evergreen Cemetery. Um So, uh thank you all so much. Love seeing the um appreciations here. Sorry I didn't see the chat. That was a funny mistake on my end. Um And I promise I'll get those other recorded the final recordings and stuff from the um other talks out too, but it's a busy time. Uh anyways, thank you all so much. Have a good night. Hope to see you out in the field soon. Bye, everyone.