In addition to its online platform, iNaturalist has an app (App Store, Google Play) that allows users to upload observations from their smartphones. (Photo by Thinkstock)
The American avocet, a large wading bird with a rust-colored neck and a beak roughly the size and shape of an upturned crochet hook, is not usually found this far inland. In fact, local naturalist Paul Bedell suspects its July 16 sighting in the James River Park System is the species’ first in Richmond.
The sighting is just one of more than 4,600 observations within the park system logged on the online platform iNaturalist. Created in 2008, the platform is part scientific database, part social network, allowing users to upload their photos of plants, animals and other organisms to project pages around the world.
The American avocet, an unusual sighting in the James River Park System (Photo by Thinkstock)
In 2015, Bedell, along with Anne Wright, assistant professor and outreach coordinator for Virginia Commonwealth University’s biology department, created a page for JRPS on the platform and began holding workshops in the park to introduce others to the tool.
Wright, who is also the creator of the website Science in the Park, says she wanted to help educate the public about biodiversity in the park system. “One of the really interesting, and not really pointed out, parts of the park is how many different things live there,” she says.
With iNaturalist, Wright says there is now a “running tab” of this diversity — a catalog that not only allows anyone to go online and see what’s in the park currently, but also provides a repository of data to track changes in the park over time.
That last part is key, according to Bedell. “What’s in [the park] today … may not be what’s here 30 years from now,” he explains. Data collected through iNaturalist is a kind of historical record, he says. “If we keep it going, we just don’t know where it’s going to lead.”
So far, it’s led to the identification of about 1,000 species and counting in the park. But Bedell and Wright suspect there are many more species, and more surprises like the avocet, to come.
No scientific credentials are required to document life along the James. Once you’ve registered, you’re connected to users from all over the world who can help you make your IDs. “It’s true citizen science,” says Bedell.
