Start at the beginning...
We are very pleased to announce that a new project to catalogue observations of plants in Madagascar is underway. 'Zavamainry Gasy' means Plants of Madagascar with 'Gasy' as shorthand for Madagascar, and sounding a bit more jazzy.
This project links to a wider initiative, generously funded by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation, which will focus on getting more plants from Madagascar assessed for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and more effective conservation actions. Although the plants of Madagascar are under extreme threat, very few have actually been listed for the Red List. This means we have no way of quantifying the extent of threat to plants and how this is changing through time. Through the use if iNaturalist we hope to supplement existing knowledge on plant distributions such as herbarium voucher collections through the collection of observation data. Observation data can be utilised for Red List assessments and can also help us to understand what is happening on the ground in terms of threats to plants.
We now have a few observations popping up on the project home page - thanks to those that have contributed. We have ambitious targets, so please help secure the future of Madagascan Plants by adding your observations. All native plants are welcome - common or rare!
PS. If you believe you have an observation of a rare and threatened plant such as an orchid, please make use of the geoprivacy options.
Steve
Comments
Hi Steve, great new project, and looking forward to see exciting plant observations from Madagascar!
I noticed that some of the recent observations were of plants already assessed by the IUCN Red List, but their respective ranking wasn't visible on the species pages. I've added the RL status for a few of them
www.inaturalist.org/taxa/363075-Dypsis-psammophila
www.inaturalist.org/taxa/362948-Dypsis-bonsai
and would encourage the community of this project to have a look out for those species that do have a RL assessment but which is missing on the iNat species page. The RL status can be added by going to the species page and clicking on "Edit" in the upper right corner. At the bottom of the page, you can then add the RL assessment with a link to the IUCN page.
Maybe there's a more elegant (= automatic) way of doing this, in which case I suggest raising it in the iNat help forum:
http://groups.google.com/group/inaturalist
Last but not least, adding a IUCN Red List ranking of Near Threatened or higher will automatically obscure the precise locations of threatened species, something that might be relevant to prevent poaching:
www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#geoprivacy
Cheers, Jakob
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