Conservation by Phone? Sure! – Georgia Wildlife Blog

By ANNA YELLIN

Do you have a cell phone? If the answer is yes, you’re on your way to becoming a volunteer for DNR’s community science iNaturalist project.

Don’t worry, this isn’t time-consuming. You can take part while hiking in a state park, watering plants at home or even searching for your car in a mall parking lot.

Picture this: While walking my dog in the neighborhood last year, I spotted a caterpillar munching on a leaf hanging from an oak branch. I pulled out my phone and snapped a photo. My dog was happy for the extra time to sniff the grass. I was happy to have another photo to add to iNaturalist.

It wasn’t a rare caterpillar. But I didn’t even need to know what it was. I only had to take a quick photo and upload it to iNaturalist. The app, the community of scientists who curate it and DNR would do the rest.

Documenting common and uncommon wildlife helps with conservation. The popularity of iNaturalist and the ease of recording observations have made the app a valuable tool for many conservation organizations.

DNR’s Wildlife Conservation Section uses iNaturalist to learn about common invertebrates as well as the distribution and seasonality of state-tracked species. Since the Georgia Tracked Species project began last year, more than 200 people have joined and about 2,100 species occurrences have been added or updated.

These observations reflect much more information than our staff could have gathered in the field during that time, even if we worked only on this project.

To all who contributed observations, thanks for helping conserve Georgia’s wildlife!

To those who haven’t joined our iNaturalist community, what are you waiting for?

Pink lady’s slippers in north Georgia (Alan Cressler)

HOW TO TAKE PART

Log into your iNaturalist account (or create one).
Using a computer (the following is not available on the app), go to the top-of-the-page dropdown labeled Community and search for or select Georgia Tracked Species, Georgia Invertebrates or Georgia Small Mammals.
Join the project. In Your Membership, answer the question “Trust this project with hidden coordinates?” with “Yes, for any of my observations.” This allows biologists to access the data, whether reported by computer or phone.
Do this for all three DNR projects: Georgia Tracked Species | Georgia Invertebrates | Georgia Small Mammals

Anna Yellin is a wildlife biologist with the DNR Wildlife Conservation Section.