Post-disaster assessments

Although disasters are often unforeseen and unreplicable, they can have profound impacts on living organisms, natural populations, and fundamental ecological processes. Scientists are increasingly recognizing the importance of these rare catastrophic events, but are often hampered by access to areas, personnel availability, lack of local familiarity, and time lags to ramp up field assessments.

The increasing popularity of Citizen Science, and the necessary computational power to curate and analyze the resulting "big data", now presents a feasible avenue through which we might rapidly assess post-disaster impacts on natural systems. Not only that, but local collaborations with citizen scientists can ensure that assessments can be replicated at intervals over time to examine the recovery (or lack thereof) of species and/or ecological communities and processes.

We are asking the iNaturalist community to contribute post-disaster information about the observed impacts on any species, including those they need expert help to identify. Such data could be gathered after a severe hailstorm, during the peak of a heat wave, in the aftermath of an oil spill, or any other catastrophic event.

Such data, even observations made days/weeks/years after the impact can be examined in the aggregate to provide invaluable insights into the resilience and recovery of natural systems. This will ultimately inform conservation science about the risks currently facing species, as well as the long-term prospects of nature under varying scenarios of global change (e.g., shifts in extreme climatic events).

Please consider joining this effort and bringing it to the attention of any local organization to which you may belong (e.g., Audubon Society chapter). Knowing ahead of time that such data can be useful will help concerned citizens in or near disaster-impacted areas to be ready to gather data which could help mitigate the impact of such disasters in other areas in the future. less ↑