Estate Living Magazine Develop - Issue 44 August 2019 | Page 55

C O M M U N I T Y
iNaturalist
All you need is a portal like iNaturalist that can help you identify
what you see, and then to document and share sightings. It’s an
international site managed for local conditions by the South African
National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI).
Simply sign up for a free account on iNaturalist, take a clear photo
or two of the plant or bird or gogga or moss (or any life form) that
you’ve seen, upload it, tag it on the site’s mapping system, and you
then either choose from the algorithm’s suggested identifications,
or mark the species as ‘Unknown’, and then wait for someone who
knows about these things to guide you towards the correct name.
And they do. These people are kind like that.
iNaturalist has many useful features, one of the best of which
is its ‘Projects’ facility. Probably best created by your estate’s
environmental officer – because projects require a bit of knowledge
both of how the site works, and of the species of your area – a project
allows groups of people to pool their observations, which will then
appear automatically in the project list whenever they’re correctly
pinned on the map.
A project on iNaturalist would have obvious benefits for your
estate – it could become an inventory of the estate’s biodiversity,
and provide a convenient, first-stop resource to help anyone who
wants to know more about the species they’ve seen in your area.
It’s useful for management too, since it links individual species to
deeper levels of information on other sites like the Red List of South
African Plants (redlist.sanbi.org), where you’ll find a measure of each
species’ risk of extinction, or the Encyclopaedia of Life.
L I V I N G
with the first Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP1), which
ended in 1992.
This groundbreaking project captured data from more than 100,000
checklists submitted by thousands of observers, many of whom
were volunteers, and all of whom were keen birders – probably still
the most avid of citizen scientists. The data from this and subsequent
bird atlas projects is used to produce distribution maps – the sort
you’ll find in the most authoritative bird books.
The ADU has also coordinated projects to map things like frogs and
butterflies and, from 2005 to 2009, partnered with SANBI on a project
to assess the conservation status of the reptiles of the subcontinent.
These all relied on citizen science to help with data collection.
And it’s the ADU that probably sums up the value of citizen science
best: ‘Each data point the ADU’s citizen scientists collect is a piece
in the jigsaw puzzle of biodiversity,’ writes Les Underhill on the unit’s
site. And then, he continues, the scientists can turn all these little
pieces of raw data into the kind of information on which conservation
decisions can be based.
How cool is that? Now your evening strolls are not just good for you,
your health, your mental health, and your family – they can also help
to save the world.
inaturalist.org/places/south-africa, biodiversityadvisor.sanbi.org, eol.org
South African National Biodiversity Institute
The University of Cape Town’s Animal Demography Unit (adu.uct.
ac.za/adu/citizen-science) began long before we had smartphones,
Animal Demography Unit
I O
Its citizen science portal (biodiversityadvisor.sanbi.org/
participation/citizen-science – launched in 2012) lists projects that
range from the Red List (‘assist in red list evaluation; anyone may
contribute’) to early detection of invasive alien species (‘Every
year new alien species start to go wild. Help us stop them’). Other
projects include developing a database of the flora of the fynbos,
documenting illegal poaching and harvesting, documenting
climate patterns, and mapping the sea corals, sea slugs, seashells,
and sea fishes of our coastline.
SANBI involves itself in citizen science through iNaturalist, and via
virtual museum projects like the South African Bird Atlas Project.
* Stuart L. Pimm, author of The World According to Pimm:
A Scientist Audits the Earth, is the Doris Duke Professor of
Conservation Ecology at Duke University’s Nicholas School
of the Environment (USA), and Extraordinary Professor in
the University of Pretoria’s Conservation Ecology Research
Unit.
Martin Hatchuel