AWAY ON FIELDWORK UNTIL SEPT 24TH
Avid botanist, beachcomber and naturalist. I am based in Sydney, but I also used to frequent the Port Macquarie Hastings region on the NSW mid-north coast, and I travel widely across Australia. I have a PhD in biodiversity informatics from the University of New South Wales; my thesis explored the integration of herbarium + iNaturalist data to improve our understanding of Australia's flora.

You can check out my website at https://thomasmesaglio.com

I have a license to collect plants and invertebrates in NSW, and regularly collect specimens to deposit at the National Herbarium of New South Wales and the John T. Waterhouse Herbarium at UNSW. I have a particular interest in documenting introduced plants, especially new national or state records, range extensions, or otherwise rare/unusual weeds.

I previously worked for the CSIRO's Atlas of Living Australia from 2023-2025. During that time I published a comprehensive Guide to iNaturalist, check it out here: https://doi.org/10.54102/ala.33300 (second edition now available)

I enjoy writing journal posts on iNat providing identification guides, taxonomic updates, and other useful information for iNaturalist observations and IDs, check them out here: https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/thebeachcomber/94678-thebeachcomber-journal-posts-index

Check out the free digital version of the second edition of my seashell field guide (careful, it's a very big file); if you would like a bound, hard cover copy instead, you can reach out to me to purchase a copy. I am lead author on a recently published comprehensive field guide to every known fish species from Sydney Harbour; we are currently out of copies, but it will be reprinted soon. I've also written a short e-book about scientific etymology entitled 'It's Helico-pter, not Heli-copter: A Beginner's Guide to Deconstructing Scientific Words and Names', which is available to download for free from here.

I spent over 450 hours on a comprehensive survey of Wategora Reserve in southwestern Sydney. The reserve contains the critically endangered Cooks River Clay Plain Scrub Forest community, of which less than 1% of its original extent remains, and is threatened on all sides by urban expansion. You can read about the survey, and download my final ~500 page report and annotated/illustrated checklist, from my website Duck River Biodiversity Survey.

I created the First Known Photographs of Living Specimens project, check it out for some amazing observations from all around the world. I also recently made a project for tracking undescribed Australian plant species.

I organised the City Nature Challenge and the Great Southern BioBlitz for Sydney from 2020-2022.

If you ever find yourself in Sydney, shoot me a message and I'd be more than happy to show you all the best spots :)

I occasionally document cultivated plants on iNaturalist (for various reasons: I think the species is a strong candidate for future naturalisation, I'm interested in the ID as a host plant for a gall or other insect, the plant looks interesting, the plant has sentimental value to me, etc), and when I do so, I will always mark them as planted/not wild. You can see these here. Therefore, any of my plant observations that are not marked as planted/cultivated are definitely wild/naturalised.

You can contact me at [email protected]

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