iNaturalist December News Highlights

Season's greetings, everyone! As we wrap up the final month of 2023, we're excited to present highlights from December. If you missed out on last month's updates, you can catch up here.

We’ve chosen Christmas Beetles as our theme this month as a reminder that despite being cold and dormant in much of the northern hemisphere, December is summer in much of the Southern Hemisphere. As described in this article by @hauke_koch, @tardigrade_tanya, @thebeachcomber and colleagues, December welcomes the arrival of these iconic native beetles in Australia, and iNaturalist is helping monitor them. The endangered Christmas Beetle story also has an interesting invasive species subplot involving look-alike Argentinian scarabs. Scroll down for more highlights from the past month. Happy reading!

New species described
Also in Australia, @russellbarrett and colleagues noticed color and shape differences in observations of a plant posted by @scottwgavins, @gsinclair, and @tjeales which led to these populations being described as a new species. These color and shape characters often don’t preserve well in museum specimens meaning this new species went unnoticed for hundreds of years. In a very similar story from the Americas, @tom_daniel compared iNaturalist observations of Mexican and Costa Rican populations of a plant side by side and noticed differences that led to the Mexican populations being described as a distinct species.

Lost species rediscovered
A Mexican sage was described over 100 years ago and hadn’t been seen since until @betootero posted an observation of one. @xanergo published the rediscovery in Phytotaxa this month. Again, in a very similar story, a cockroach species was described from a specimen with the vague label of “Central America'' and hadn’t been relocated until observations were noticed on iNaturalist. @josuergg and colleagues published the rediscovery here. Likewise, this article highlights iNaturalist’s role in the rediscovery in Andean plants thought to be extinct for 100 years.

First living photographs
After @cisnerosheredia posted this striking insect observation, @wongun and others identified what turned out to represent the first known photographs of the insect in life. @cisnerosheredia published the discovery here. This project contains over 6,000 other such examples of first known photographs of species on iNaturalist.

Range Extensions
Keeping with our beetle theme, this month’s issue of the Coleopterists Bulletin alone included three papers confirming new state records of 3 different beetle species first reported on iNaturalist: a rove beetle in Illinois, a ground beetle in Washington, and a weevil in Canada. Likewise, this publication reports @nastya_klimova’s observation of the first recent record of a bird in Russia.

Improving Distributions
This story recounts the discovery of the Olinguito by @rolandisimo and colleagues and the ongoing role iNaturalist plays in helping the authors better understand its distribution. Similarly, this report describes how @marianneleroux, @jboatwright and other members of CREW use an iNaturalist project to better understand the distribution of Silverpods in South Africa. iNaturalist observations formed important pieces of puzzles for understanding the range of a butterfly in Europe and Underwing moths in Canada.

We already mentioned the Christmas beetle look-alike Argentinian scarab invading Australia (hint, these aren’t Christmas beetles). Other stories from this month about using iNaturalist for invasive species science included this study on invasion risk from a weed in Ecuador by @edulg, @ileanaherrera and colleagues. This video on new invasive species in Georgia features @joseph136 and the iNaturalist app for reporting sightings. Tracking the spread of invasive Joro Spiders on iNaturalist got more coverage this month in the New York Times. Other stories involving tracking invasive species on iNaturalist included invasive nudibranchs in Long Island Sound, tracking exotic ferns in South America, and an invasive slug in Poland.

Urban biodiversity
In a relatively small Australian suburban yard, @rqy-yong and @matthew_holden surprised their colleagues by documenting over 1,000 species using iNaturalist. The study prompted interesting discussions about the future of biodiversity monitoring in this article and on the iNaturalist forum. Other studies linking urbanization to biodiversity patterns included this study from California and this study or beetle diversity from Zagreb in Croatia.

Scaling monitoring
This month, government agencies including South African National Parks and the New Zealand Department of Conservation encouraged the public to use iNaturalist to help scale their biodiversity monitoring efforts. Likewise, stories mentioned using iNaturalist to monitor canids in Maine, endangered turtles in Canada, land snails in Florida, and birds in California. We loved this story about @jeremiah_psiropoulos and colleagues using iNaturalist to monitor a ski resort in Colorado.

Restoration and Stewardship
iNaturalist plays other roles in land stewardship beyond just monitoring. For example, iNaturalist is helping collect information to design wildlife crossings such as those being implemented to reduce newt road mortality in California as well as much larger wildlife corridors such as this new National Park in Connecticut. iNaturalist is also being used as a tool for stewardship to help gardeners avoid accidentally planting invasive plant species and helping golf courses diagnose tree diseases.

Heat mortality
With 2023 ending as the hottest year on record, iNaturalist is helping scientists understand the impacts of warming. This article describes a project by @jenydavis and colleagues at the Desert Botanical Garden to track the growing number of Saguaro cactuses dying from intense heat.

Changing phenology
Climate change is also driving the earlier onset of spring. In this study, scientists used iNaturalist to better understand climate change driven shifts in plant phenology (timing of the onset of leafing and flowering) across the Appalachian Trail Corridor. This study describes how scientists from South Africa are using iNaturalist data in machine learning data to make flowering phenology predictions for nearly 7,000 species of plants.

Climate change and evolution
In this fascinating article and video, @emilyblack19 and @katieemarshall described how they used phenology data from the great webworm hunt to understand how climate can influence evolution via whether populations have split into separate species based on the timing of life histories (allochronic speciation). Their research may help us explain why there are more species in the tropics which is one of the most important questions in ecology and evolution.

Photos associated with iNaturalist observations can reveal information about how more than one species interact. This interesting story describes ongoing controversy over whether Texas Crested Caracaras are killing livestock or rather scavenging already dead livestock. Since legislation allowing rangers to shoot these birds may depend on the difference, Texas Parks and Wildlife is encouraging the public to post observations of Caracara-livestock interactions. From Caracara’s eating livestock to mites parasitizing lizards, this study by @stephgodfrey and colleagues used iNaturalist data to better understand mite infestations in New Zealand geckos. This study by @jmbarrios and colleagues describes efforts to compile Mexican bee-plant interactions from iNaturalist.

Data quality
One of the reasons why iNaturalist data is incorporated into so many studies and external projects is because it is an open data initiative and is relatively accurate. Regarding data accuracy, this study by @robgur and colleagues assessed the accuracy of iNaturalist observations of plants in the Southeastern US and found the accuracy to be about 84% which was significantly more accurate than herbarium records assessed (76%).

Open data collaborations
Data sharing between Wikipedia (sharing species descriptions with iNaturalist) and iNaturalist (sharing images with Wikipedia) plus community sharing (many iNat users are Wikipedia editors and vice versa) is a great example of open data initiative collaboration. This story describes an editathon (Wikipedia editing event) hosted by @magcl, @anabela2 at ArgentiNat (iNaturalist Argentina), Wikimedia and others which added or enhanced over 100 Spanish Wikipedia species pages and added over 50 images.

Building on iNaturalist
As for other examples this month of how iNaturalist data and services are shared, this San Francisco Chronicle article includes a dynamic Mushroom Map that incorporates data fetched from iNaturalist’s API. This story highlights the Find-a-Pest app in New Zealand which fetches not just data but also species suggestions from the iNaturalist Computer Vision Model. For a less high-tech example of open-data at work in New Zealand, the Wellington City Council included the most common garden species posted to iNaturalist in their 2023 top of the pops lists of the weird, the wacky and the wonderful.

One of the most vibrant areas where iNaturalist open data is being put to work is in the rapidly evolving field of Artificial Intelligence. The iNaturalist dataset continues to be a widely used to benchmark (evaluate and compare) new advances in AI as demonstrated in studies this month by Petit et al., Zhang et al., Sastry et al. Many groups are using the iNaturalist data not just to evaluate models but to train their own computer vision models such as the model described in this article which combines images compiled from iNaturalist by @gvanhorn with images from the Encyclopedia of Life ( 45% of which were also archived from iNaturalist). Other models trained on iNaturalist data have been applied to control corn pests, identify Taiwanese spiders and mushrooms in Türkiye, and monitor risks of jellyfish stings. This BBC News article includes iNaturalist as part of a review of animal spotting AI. This article highlights iNaturalist as an example of ethical Artificial Intelligence decision making.

Public health science
This month, several medical studies made use of iNaturalist data such as this paper tracking the distribution of kissing bugs which are vectors of Chagas disease causing parasites. This study describes using iNaturalist to record bat-cat interactions to better understand disease spillover events of bat-associated coronaviruses. This article describes using iNaturalist to help with medical cases from stinging caterpillars in Panama.

Mental wellbeing
iNaturalist is also impacts mental health through the therapeutic benefits of connecting to nature. For example, this inspiring profile of @plantsoflacounty and his efforts to photograph every native plant in Los Angeles county describes how nature photography is helping him grieve and recover amidst personal tragedy.

Social justice social sciences
As a reminder that access to the public health benefits of nature are not always equitable, this study by researchers at Berkeley used iNaturalist data to show how discriminatory redlining practices have had long-term impacts on biodiversity richness. There was also more coverage this month on the Yale study we highlighted last month that revealed differences in the densities of iNaturalist and eBird data correlating with redlining practices. But the Berkeley study is noteworthy by reporting differences in Accumulated Biodiversity Richness (which controls for these differences in data densities). This is suggested to be due to decreased vegetation cover and increased disturbance in less affluent neighborhoods supporting fewer species.

Social network social sciences
Lastly, we found this paper by @guiming and colleagues on the factors such as geographic location and taxonomic interest that drive social interactions on iNaturalist to be fascinating.

Recapping November events
There was great coverage about the 2023 Great Southern Bioblitz which happened last month including these two articles from southern Africa here and here.

December events
We loved this coverage of the 2023 Winter Solstice Sea Star Search. Don’t miss this hilarious video on how researchers like @rebeccafay and @kestrel at the California Academy of Sciences are making use of these data for sea star conservation. This article describes a bioblitz in Türkiye on December 10th.

Recapping 2023 Events
This report describes the Butterflies in My Backyard event in Canada wrapped up in December. The Bureau of Land Management Crowdsourcing Plan released this month features an earlier bioblitz in Basin and Range National Monument as an example project. This article by @carancho and @anabela2 describes Argentina bioblitzes on ArgentiNat (iNaturalist Argentina) such as City Nature Challenge and the Great Southern Bioblitz.