iNaturalist January News Highlights

New species described
Listen to @johnmanning share the story of describing a new species of South African iris from a posting by @alexanderr.

🪰 This article describes a new species of Alaskan snakeworm described by @dssikes, @pereiratpl and colleagues and the role their iNaturalist project played in the discovery.

Lost species rediscovered
Re:Wild has been using iNaturalist as part of their effort to relocate lost species. This interesting article describes a recent publication summarizing their progress. So far, 27% of species on the list published in the study are represented by observations in their iNaturalist project.

Range Extensions

• This article describes @jggbrown, @kevinthiele and @mftasp’s discovery of the first known population of a rare violet from Tasmania.
• This study by @collinst, @dougvg, @frankiecoburn, and @acschneider documented the first disjunct Arizona population of a plant found in New Mexico.
• This study by @makario, @angel-romero, and colleagues used an observation by @antshrike69 to document the first known occurrence of a South American snake in Central America.

Improving Distributions
iNaturalist is increasingly used as the basis for studies to increase our basic understanding of species biogeography and diversity. For example, @k_jiaranaisakul and colleagues used iNaturalist records to fill out distribution maps for 14 species of lanternflies from Thailand. This month we highlight biogeography studies using iNaturalist data on:

• Plants from Uzbekistan
• Phloeidae Bugs from South America
• Arachnids from Cuba
• and Rays from Fiji

A study published this month by @flo_grattarola and colleagues used 15 years of iNaturalist records to track the spread of invasive sea fig across Uruguay.

• There was another article on an invasive crayfish population in Canada and the role @drcrayfish played in identifying it.
• 🪰 @rodrigo_barahona_13 and colleagues studied the spread of a Woodlouse parasitizing fly in Chile with the help of an iNaturalist project

There were many other invasive species studies leveraging iNaturalist this month including studies on:

• The spread of Chinese Tallow and invasive moths in Florida
• An invasive beetle in South Africa
• Invasive plants in Russia in two studies here and here
• An invasive plant in Ukraine
• An invasive plant in Arkansas

We were able to make our own case for how iNaturalist spurs conservation in a Revelator article this month.

As the southern hemisphere summer continues, we saw more stories this month from the New Zealand Government and about South African National Parks on using iNaturalist to help scale their limited monitoring capacity for conservation. The stories are connected with two of iNaturalist’s most prolific community members with the former profiling @jon_sullivan and the latter co authored by @tonyrebelo.

Protected Area management

• This study by @eric_tigrerito and colleagues assessed use of iNaturalist for protected area monitoring and management in Mexico.
• Similarly, this study by @lcmarinho1 and colleagues explored the use of iNaturalist for monitoring in a Brazilian State Park.
• This story about a The Nature Conservancy preserve in Michigan highlights the role iNaturalist plays in communicating the value of preserves to the public through showcasing the biodiversity that has been observed within them.

Restoration and Stewardship

• This article by @wncbotany describes a vision for regenerating landscapes for biodiversity and the role that iNaturalist plays.

iNaturalist is helping us understand how a warmer world is impacting biodiversity. This story describes winter bioblitzes that @ihz2 and colleagues are conducting to understand the effects of warmer winters in the finger lakes region.

This story features @jtanney0's work to understand the spread of sooty-bark disease to drought stricken trees in a warming Victoria through their project.

Warm water events off the Pacific Coast led to the spread seastar wasting disease. This story describes how @rbank and colleagues are using iNaturalist to monitor the spread of and recovery from this disease.

Many species undergo seasonal migrations that are complicated by climate change. This story describes the listing of Monarch butterflies in Canada as endangered and accompanying efforts to ramp up monitoring using iNaturalist by @carolyncallaghan and colleagues at the Canadian Wildlife Federation. This study used iNaturalist data to better understand the timing of Monarch migrations in California.

On the topic of climate change and species migrations, we enjoyed this article by @frances_figart about unexpected vagrants showing up in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

iNaturalist images are valuable not just for documenting a single organism in space and time but also for documenting interactions between organisms and all sorts of other "secondary data" as described in this study. This month there were three great stories that used iNaturalist to better understand interactions between birds and food plants.

• The first was a study that used iNaturalist images to reveal a more diverse diet for the endangered Red-bellied Macaw than was previously known.
• The second story was a about the mysterious paralysis of lorikeets in Australia and the iNaturalist project that @david4262 and colleagues are using to determine which food plant may be poisoning the birds.
• Lastly, @emilymstone wrote a great article about her travels in Hawaii and the interaction between the endemic Nene goose and the endemic blueberry relatives they feed on.

This revolution that allows scientists to access species interactions and other secondary data contained in nature photographs like those described in the previous section is driven by the availability of large volumes of nature photography and new AI tools to efficiently pull out patterns from these images for analysis.

We’ve been calling this the Phenotypic Revolution, but from this study we learned a new term for it: iEcology (internet ecology). In the study, researchers used iNaturalist images to characterize the global shift in hermit crabs from using shells to using plastic trash as homes and the impacts on behavior and evolution.

Meanwhile,

• iNaturalist continues to be used as a standard benchmarking dataset for evaluating new AI and machine learning techniques such as those described in papers by Xiao and colleagues and by Kim and colleagues. These studies benefit iNaturalist by developing new concepts that we can integrate into our infrastructure as these experiments by @alexshepard show.
• Lastly, long time iNaturalist collaborator @gvanhorn and colleagues describe new research to combine Computer Vision and Large Language Models in this study.

Participating in iNaturalist doesn’t just help species; it also helps humans. Here are three ways:

• Getting outside and connecting with nature even in winter is good for you as eloquently described by @marieviljoen in this article describing her winter iNaturalist finds. Likewise, this article has tips on how iNaturalist can help get your kids outdoors this winter.
• An increasing number of people are finding foraging as a gateway for connecting them to nature. This article provides some tips for how iNaturalist can help and this study uses an iNaturalist project to understand urban foraging.
• While some things in nature are healthy, others are unhealthy. This toxicology study uses iNaturalist to better understand stinging caterpillars in the United States. Likewise, this article mentions iNaturalist in the context of threats from venomous snakes in Australia.

🪰 This article explains how some flies, like the Australian blowfly, are harmful to agriculture while others, like the Australian hoverfly, are beneficial against a beautiful backdrop of fly photography from @acerad.

On the social science front, there was more work this month from @guiming and colleagues on understanding community patterns within the iNaturalist social network.

During a stop on her adventures sailing around the world making iNaturalist observations, @mandapanda made such an impression snorkeling off Greece in December that she was covered by the local news. If you don’t speak Greek, we definitely recommend having your browser translate the article and give it a read. Other iNatters in the news this month included:

• This great video of @alan_rockefeller discussing mushroom photography and his excellent hat choice.
• 🪰 @sherylsr from Texas Parks and Wildlife wrote this excellent story on the wonder of flies!
• In Southern California, @ibhappy’s kestrel observation was featured as iNaturalist Spotting of the Month while this story highlight’s @gregwatson passion for desert reptiles.