Virginia Wildlife Mapping
We are excited to begin using this new platform for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries' Wildlife Mapping data-base. We hope to continue collecting all of the species observations from our existing Wildlife Mappers as well as many new citizen scientists. We are emphasizing observations of reptiles and amphibians to be used in a new Virginia Herp Atlas. But please continue to report all of your wildlife observations.
Comments
I think this is great! I'm trying to get DC DOEE on board with iNaturalist too. Added a bear and a snake. Might add more later but the several required fields make it difficult to bulk-add observations. Also, the "genus species" field is redundant since you can easily get that from the iNaturalist export. Hope this is a big help for the VA Herp Atlas!
This is very neat. Do you have a parallel project for plants?
Thanks. I just learned about this site at the Virginia Master Naturalist Conference last weekend. I plan on being a contributor. But I learned last night that all of my photos that I thought were being geotagged by my Nikon Coolpix camera have apparently not been. Do you have any suggestions about how I can diagnose that problem? Photos on my iPhone are geotagged correctly but most of my photos are taken with the camera, so I am trying to plot the location as best I can.
I'm not sure about how to work a Nikon camera but I did want to mention if you haven't seen it yet that you can use the locational uncertainty feature to add a big buffer around observations when you don't know where they are. You enter a buffer number so it makes a circle big enough that the observation was seen somewhere in the circle. I used that a lot when making observations from older photos.
one other thing - if the nikon gps doesn't work you can also download an app that will automatically track your location when turned on and will tag your photos based on the timestamp.
Thanks Charlie. I am learning how the site works and the buffer info is very helpful. A lot of my observations really need a linear buffer than a big circle (for example I know they were along a certain trail or stream) but this is still good to know. thanks for the other ideas. Art
Yeah, it would be neat to be able to create a linear buffer or draw a freeform buffer, but for now you can only do a circle,which isn't ideal
I just signed up with iNaturalsit. I was looking for the project for the Virginia Wildlife Mapping under the Project list on the app but I didn't see one. If I want my observations to be reported to the Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Whoever in the State Government Cares Department which project should I sign up for via the INaturalist app? Could you government types please set up a project or program on the app. My son works for a swimming pool company and he sees lots of frogs and toads. He posted a pic of a Carpenter Frog on Facebook. I looked it up and realized that the Carpenter Frog a Virginia Wildlife Action Plan Rating Tier III. I sent him a observation map with a few red dots for this type of from and his comment was that "They need to add more dots." He probably see them all the time in his line of work. He is always commenting on all the frogs and toads he has to pull out of the swimming pools. He could easily take a pic and use the app during work. Please add a Virginia project to the list.
@charlottedere if you join this project: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/virginia-wildlife-mapping/journal then you will also be able to add observations from the app. you can also ust upload them to 'regular' inaturalist using the app, and then add them to the proect on the website. As for what the state of Virginia is doing with the data I can't tell you, but even if you don't add it to that project, adding it to inaturalist will create a record that biologists will see!
Are you still mostly looking for reptiles, or for any rare organisms? What counts as "rare"?
(The most recent journal post appears to be closed to comments, so I replied here.)
Edit: It looks like it'd be any species on this list? http://bewildvirginia.org/species/SGCN-List-July-2016.pdf Would it make sense to add these species automatically, or is there additional benefit we can provide by adding them manually?
@schizoform Hello and thanks for your questions! Correct the Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN) list is the list of species that we are most interested in. For the time being we are still mostly interested in the amphibians and reptiles on that list, but please continue to share observations of any species on that list. I'm not sure what you mean about adding species automatically versus manually. Can you please explain further? I will open the most recent journal post to questions/comments. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
Howdy! I just wanted to check in. Which is a bit cheeky, seeing as how I seem to have left you hanging for 2 years.
Re: "adding species automatically versus manually", traditional projects like this one require us to manually add our observations, whereas new-style projects automatically filter observations based on their characteristics. I wondered if this project was still active or if it had been replaced by a new-style project where observations of species-of-interest are added automatically.
Either way, happy to help however I can. Thanks for your work for our world.
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