Cole Gaerber Curator

Joined: Jul 23, 2016 Last Active: Sep 17, 2026 iNaturalist Canada

Notifications -- I take occasional lengthy breaks from iNat, which means I lose many notifications as time passes, upwards of a thousand this year so far that are now unrecoverable. I have a gargantuan backlog of existing notifications and it's difficult to find enough time to work through them all. I sincerely apologize for any missed pings, PMs, or very late replies to comments. Please PM me instead for anything you need addressed.


All-around amateur naturalist from Vancouver BC, presently studying Geological Sciences. Primarily interested in disjunct populations, ultramafic/serpentine endemic flora, glacial refugia, and long-term species population trends. I'm always trying to get out into the field as much as possible and learn further how to ID different groups of taxa. Like many others it all started with birding, but (thanks to iNat) I've become a generalist and look to ID anything in nature I don't recognize.

I became a curator to add missing species to iNaturalist taxonomy and fix establishment statuses/common names/etc. - If you see a missing taxon that needs to be added, species to be marked as introduced, common name changed, etc. feel free to PM me instead of waiting for a flag to be addressed. Happy to add any taxon providing it's accepted by the taxonomic authorities that iNat follows and isn't otherwise controversial or already flagged.

Please tag me if you want me to explain or review/retract any ID I've made, as I still make mistakes like everyone else.


iNat tips/tricks:

iNat Search URL Filter tips/tricks:

  • How to use iNaturalist Search URLs Wiki - Immensely useful resource to narrow down your searches. A few shortcuts below:

  • &hrank=species&unobserved_by_user_id=yourusername - filter for only species you haven't seen

  • &introduced=false&hrank=species - exclude introduced species (only show natives and those not yet marked as introduced or native within a jurisdiction)

  • &per_page=200 - on Identify pages, change 30 results per page to 200

  • iNat Compare Tool - Use search filters to create different lists and find the differences between them. There's an extremely wide range of uses for this tol from tracking out-of-range observations to finding species only first recorded in a place in the current year.

Projects and Lists: - Please DM me if you find any edits/corrections to be made.

List Index -- Amongst numerous others, many compiled lists I've made of the endemic taxa of most of the world's most remote islands where I could not find a full list of endemics online.

British Columbia-specific:

Projects:

All my photos are free to use for any non-commercial or educational use, so long as credit given. Please let me know though; I'm always curious where they end up!

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