A Look At Our iNaturalist Project

By Mark Nenadov

The Birth of a Project

Let’s time travel. We’re time-machining to 1992 and I’m writing for the Fall 1992 issue of The Egret.

I’m pitching the concept of iNaturalist and eBird. If I’m lucky, The Egret will print it right after a curious note on page two about the reintroduction of Wild Turkeys to Essex County. Imagine that! Wild Turkeys roaming Essex County–can’t wait to add them to my county list back home in 2022!

Everyone would wonder: who is this strange person? No one would  take me seriously. I wouldn’t get any investors. Just as a simple tiny moth depends on an ever complex web of life, a “simple” website or app depends on a rich ecology of technology and culture. Facebook or Instagram weren’t merely absent in 1992 because the tech wasn’t yet created, they were also absent because everything that surrounded them was different.

You can be a bona fide nature enthusiast without ever touching iNaturalist or eBird. But they both changed the “environment” so to speak and conversely have grown out of the current “environment”. Even if they disappeared off the map, they’ve sure left a mark on things.

Essex County Field Naturalists’ Club has desired to find a way to experiment with integrating iNaturalist as a tool and introduce its members to it. In April 2021, a “Essex County Field Naturalists’ Club Observations” project was created.  Basically, it is an “aggregation project”, it takes a lot of specifics (your individual iNaturalist observations) and ties them together in a broader context (all the iNaturalist observations of club members).

Let’s look at some project statistics and highlight a few observations!

Some Statistics (*Accurate as of August 25th)

So what happened with the iNaturalist project since April 2021?

34 of our members joined. Immediately as they joined, their observations were “sewn together” in a nice wad of observations. 26,538 in total!!

26,538 is roughly 28% of all the observations in our county and something like 0.2% of the global submissions.

This amounts to 3,534 species of plants and animals. Breaking it down further, 208 species of flies, 280 species of birds, 906 species of butterflies and moths, 743 species of plants, 90 species of spiders, etc. You get the drift.

How Is This Significant?

Ok, you will grant that there’s a big wad of data here. But what does it mean?

It’s really, really hard to gauge the significance of these observations. What’s “significant” is very subjective. To whom? For what purpose?

We can’t predict the future. We have no clue what future generations might find significant. Who’d have thought turkeys roaming free almost everywhere in our county would be what 2022 looks like? (Some of our more senior members maybe remember some of those pre-turkeys-running-free days)

When it comes to documenting biodiversity, there’s something to be said for letting others (whether a future scientist or even a future you) determine what’s significant. Collectl, collect, collect, and then let the filtering happen later.

Of course, a true note-taker can’t record everything and tries to have an eye for what is important. On the other hand, though, the best note-takers also have an eye for things that might not seem important now but may have some sliver of significance for the future. Maybe it’s those morsels that you could have easily passed over which become the focal point at some future date!

Ultimately, our collection of data is going to reflect our own fascination and interests. Maybe you are an entomology amateur who is really fascinated by dragonflies. Or a gardener that’s a bit paranoid about that bug and what it might do to your squash pants. Or you are a mushroom forager. Or you’re a bird nerd.  Or an angler who is into fish. Or a student who got hoodwinked into using that app. We do not collect neutrally. However you slice it, our little enthusiasms or quirks or compulsions or curiosities or perhaps desire to graduate has propelled us to submit photos that aggregate to something that is bigger as a whole.

This aggregation is what makes this project what it is. And you never know exactly what will come out of such aggregations. I’d say we should keep on submitting data and see what comes out of it. The kicker is–we will have a ton of fun while we do it and we will learn a bunch.

These observations are also a drop in the bucket compared to what is going on globally, and yet they also tell a distinct story about Essex County’s biodiversity. These 3,400+ species are really special. Just think of all their triumphs and struggles to survive in a hostile environment. (By the way, not far from two thousand of our observations were of species considered to be “threatened”)

Next we will look at some noteworthy observations. I’m not necessarily trying to collect the most rare observations or the most technically perfect photos. I just want to give a sample that is representative in many ways. And I hope no botanists will get on my case for under representation! I suppose the Mycologists (fungi enthusiasts)  and Coleopterists (beetle fanatics) will be even more upset!

Some Noteworthy Observations