Hello and welcome Great Lakes Fish Finders!

We at Shedd are Excited to announce a general RELAUNCH of the Great Lakes Fish Finder app/Project! You may have noticed that we started this project back in 2014, however we got ahead of ourselves and are happy to be back on track with managing and culturing this project.

HUGE shout out to all those whom have joined, stuck around, and contributed to this project throughout the past 5 years! We are nearing 400 observation from over 100 people!! Your observations are useful and continue to provide data the science community can use! We at Shedd hope to support and encourage you to continue your efforts through journal posts, periodic contests, special projects, and by highlighting publications that use iNaturalist data to answer tough questions.

To start the new year we want to point your attention to
Our published paper about our goals! we can share a version of it private from HERE.

The Great Lakes themselves represent the largest connected surface area of flowing freshwaters globally (244,000 km2), containing ~21% of the world’s freshwaters, which are home to 142 fish species. The region houses ~92 million people and host about 1.8 million anglers annually! These numbers join together to mean the Great Lakes stand as a region prime for iNaturalist project focused on fish observations.

The key benefits are that the data are open sourced, photos are GeoTagged, and the platform fosters a community of fish enthusiasts (as well as being free) which other apps cant match.

Your data can be used to:

• Sentinel for invasive species
• Studies of when and where Migratory fishes appear
• What fish are found in harbors and how that changes through the year
• Species distributions in areas not typically sampled (You microfishers can get to things normal state and federal biologists don't have time to!)

You iNaturalists outnumber researchers and career biologists 100 if not 1000 to 1 and thus collectively you can sample locations with more frequency than any program could! Your collective knowledge of species identification and distribution can contribute to the observational database, aide in the identification of others' catches, and promote an overall sense of community for the project.

Thank you so Much, and we are looking forward to working with you!