iNat accomplishments at Sagehen

Of course the outreach benefits are great, but I thought it would be a good idea to list some ways that your observations on iNaturalist are helping Sagehen meet its research mission...

• Increasing our knowledge of the basin: researchers and students have been collecting at Sagehen for 68 years now, but iNaturalist has helped us discover previously unreported species of plants, insects, fungus, and even higher animals. There's just no substitute for more eyes on the ground!
• Triggering more research requests: researchers can use iNaturalist to find the taxa that interest them. We've hosted researchers who found us from your observations of Lupinus, Ceanothus, Mimulus, Silene, and other taxa.
• Generating new scientific publications: your research-grade iNaturalist observations are reported to GBIF, where they are used in scientific work around the world. There are now hundreds of recent publications using Sagehen's iNaturalist observations (and our other digitized collections data). That's work that is helping us understand our planet which simply wouldn't have happened without this data.
• Providing a mechanism for targeted Citizen Science: researchers can work with us to recruit observations of specific phenomena, like anther-smut fungus, various plant subspecies, or volunteer insect collection.
• Improving ID tools: researchers used iNaturalist observations to identify hybrids, collect voucher specimens, then update the plant keys.
• Providing background information about species distribution in the basin: this observation data will be useful in tracking changes in the decades to come.

So keep your observations coming!

Posted on July 5, 2018 04:53 AM by faerthen