Learn, Curate, and Create

We know it is hard not to long for mountain trails during COVID-19 stay-at-home orders with the signs of spring popping up every day. However, it is best to stay safe with backyard and walkable nature outings where physical distancing practices are followed. We have some suggested activities you might enjoy from your home.

Learn:
We presented a recent webinar focused on Northeast alpine research that you can view here: https://bit.ly/Citizen-Science-Webinar-15Apr2020 where we included some initial project results at the end. We found that iNaturalist observers catch the earliest flowering times for some alpine species compared to our plot method and the spatial coverage was greatly expanded by volunteers like you! We will be sharing more of our project results soon.

Curate:
If you know your Red Trillium from your Painted Trillium consider climbing to the top of a species identifier board. By helping to identify species on iNaturalist and confirming others identifications you can help create more Research Grade data. For our project we spent a lot of time checking the identification of our target alpine species but as new observations come in more will need to be curated. Once an observation is added to our projects we also have phenology Observation Fields that follow the National Phenology Network protocol definitions. If you would like to learn more about helping us fill out these fields and want additional training you can message gmurray in iNaturalist.

Create:
You can still create data by going through photos on your mobile device or camera from years past not yet uploaded to iNaturalist. For our study we want photos of the same plant, along the same trail, every spring. So please include all your past mountain flower photos that have geolocation information to create a robust phenology picture!

Happy 50th Earth Day!

Posted on April 22, 2020 03:42 PM by gmurray