iNaturalist March News Highlights

Happy Easter everyone! We had a hard time narrowing down our highlights this month from so many great stories. If you missed last month’s highlights, you can catch up here.

Species Discoveries

Here are three of the most amazing species discoveries on iNaturalist from this month:

A. In New Zealand, @pav_johnsson hung a mothlight from his hotel balcony while on a birding trip and became the only living person known to have seen the holy grail of New Zealand moths, the Frosted Phoenix moth.

B. In California, @lcollingsparker posted an observation that, with the help of scientists @easmeds, @bugsoundsjc, and @willc-t, turned out to be the rediscovery of Western Red Cicada which was thought to be extinct.

C. In Brazil, @birdernaturalist played an important role in the rediscovery of the Tananá, a katydid used as an example in Darwin’s writings on sexual selection that hasn’t been seen for 150 years.

Distributions and Range Extensions

These three examples illustrate why iNaturalist is such a powerful tool for monitoring changing species distributions in real time:

D. As shown in this observation by @pondgators, the sudden appearance of thousands of By-the-wind-sailors covering beaches documented by the iNaturalist community made headlines in California and Oregon.

E. In Arizona, @lynnharper, @hootyowl52, and @cameronramsey discovered the first U.S. record of a Mexican Beetle.

F. In Brazil, @rogerriodias contributed the northernmost record of an extremely rare Lance Lacewing to this study published by @calebcalifre.

Invasive Species Science

G. @brendaramirez and @jmccorm’s Free-Flying Los Angeles Parrot Project was featured in this article on how these non-native parrots like this one are adapting to urban forests of California.

Similarly, iNaturalist data is revealing how Swinhoe’s white-eye is expanding in California by using these urban forests according to a new study in Biological Invasions by @devonderaad and colleagues.

Conservation Science

iNaturalist is scaling how the conservation community is monitoring and protecting endangered species.

H. Thanks to observations like this one by @renae_mermaid, the iSeahorse project on iNaturalist improved International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List assessments for 35 of the 46 known seahorse species.

I. Florida is home to the critically endangered Smalltooth Sawfish such as this one observed by @rangeldiaz. Scientists like @dean167 are trying to understand why they are mysteriously dying and are asking the public to post observations to iNaturalist.

J. The collision death of Flaco this month, the beloved owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in New York, has refocused attention on bird deaths by building collisions and the many iNaturalist projects seeking to better understand and prevent this phenomenon by gathering observations like this one by @jtmerryman.

Climate Change Science

This study in PLoS from March used iNaturalist data to project the extent to which climate change will shuffle the species found in North American cities in the next few decades. Here are two more examples of how scientists are using iNaturalist to understand climate change impacts.

K. Climate change is causing earlier springs and warmer winters which is taking a toll on species. In Massachusetts, @maryhannah are monitoring how native hemlock trees are under increased pressure from the hemlock wooly adelgid pest which thrives in warm winters.

L. Similarly, @fuzzybumblebee explains how warmer winters in Minnesota are stressing native bees like this one observed unusually early by @daniellehudson by interrupting their winter hibernation.

iEcology

We continue to be amazed at all the ecological insights scientists are gleaning from information contained in iNaturalist images (iEcology). For example, this month we saw of studies on:

M. Understanding color aberrations - such as this white Rufous-collared Sparrow observed by @myerssusan included in this publication from Ecuador. @allisonshultz is also using iNaturalist to understand bird plumage patterns. This PNAS study on neon colored sea anemones and this study on wasp pigmentation in Italy use iNaturalist to explore the link between climate and these changes in pigmentation

N. Discovering new hosts species for spider wasps - such as this tarantula hawk observed parasitizing Dotted Wolf Spider by @rochalita that was included in a new study by @rickcwest and @frankkurczewski.

O. Understanding life histories of gall wasps - such as this observation of the gall made by a Dandelion Gall Wasp by @earley_bird included in this study by @louisnastasi.

AI Naturalist

P. In Germany, @jchiavassa and colleagues published a study on an automated malaise trap that leverages iNaturalist's Computer Vision AI to demo autonomously recording and identifying biodiversity records.

iNaturalist continues to be a standard benchmarking dataset used in AI studies around the globe like these five this month from Zhang et al., Bu et al., Cong et al., Hogeweg et al., and Daroya et al.

Bioblitzes and Events

Three big upcoming events dominated the news in March:

• Q. Cities preparing for the upcoming City Nature Challenge 2024 in April made headlines around the world such as this article about City Nature Challenge 2024 Luxembourg organized by @paul_luap. Thank you to all the CNC 2024 organizers led by @kestrel and @lhiggins!
• The upcoming solar eclipse made headlines as @rebeccafay and other scientists prepare to leverage the opportunity and iNaturalist to better understand how animals respond.
• With the northern hemisphere spring ramping up, there were many stories about where and when to find super blooms near you.

iNaturalist and Social Sciences

In a Nature Sustainability paper titled “Mobile Apps for 30×30 Equity”, @duanbiggs and colleagues recommend building on iNaturalist to link data collection to payments in order to simultaneously fill data gaps and provide financial support for people in developing economies. This study dovetails with another study in People and Nature this month by @cesarestien and colleagues on how socioeconomic factors can drive participation gaps on iNaturalist.

iNaturalist’s Education Impact

R. This article describes an "Exploring Nature using iNaturalist" training in Indonesia that @naufalurfi helped teach.

Other articles on using iNaturalist in the classroom included this one on bioblitzes by @issacvshl, this one on elementary school climate change education in Portugal, and this one by @katetilly and colleagues on using iNaturalist in the college classroom setting.

iNatters in the News

S. Don’t miss this great profile on @dj_maple from Australia who has posted over 15,000 observations to iNaturalist including many rare moths.

T. In British Columbia, this article describes @stephbrulot’s encounter with a 2-foot deep sea Giant Siphonophore

U. This article by @underwaterpat describes his encounter with a ribbon worm hunting a goby off the California coast.

V. This article tells the story of @srichakrapranav and @vimalraj’s encounter with a group of Sea Swallows along the Bay of Bengal in India

Thank you to everyone who participated in iNaturalist this March. We're amazed by all the impact this incredible community is having around the world. You can become an iNaturalist supporter by clicking the link below:

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Posted on March 31, 2024 07:08 PM by loarie