I quickly determined that iNat is NOT the app for my fight-invasive-honey initiative (so don’t worry—the app WILL NOT be flooded with pics of invasive honeysuckle [IH]). Maybe you guys can suggest another app, though.
The objective is to raise people’s consciousness of invasive plants, starting withIH, in our city (Takoma Park MD), as a stepping stone to getting the city govt. to undertake some kind of removal program. I’m looking for an app where (1) knowledgeable volunteers can upload pictures and addresses of invasive honeysuckle (min requirement), and (2) interested homeowners can query whether that unknown bush in their yard is IH, and upload the picture and address if it is (desirable app feature). I can think of other features (different color markers to denote different invasive species) but I am trying to manage my expectations.
Not only would such an app be extremely useful in the work of removing invasives, a journalist professor advised me that an app is a great “hook” to get press coverage calling attention to the problem.
Any suggestions?
Try what’s invasive if that’s still active or if you have money and want to go serious mode, iMap Invasives. Fine to flood iNat with invasive honeysuckle though. I do it.
Yes, invasives ARE of interest. It’s a component in an ecosystem!
You can tag it as invasive, so that observations can be easily sorted. Or you can fill out an observation field for that, although the search engine works better with tags than with fields
Thanks for these responses. Very helpful
Have you considered creating a collection project for invasive honeysuckle species for your city? The main thing you want that might be missing from an iNaturalist collection project is the ability to collect observations that have not been identified yet but have been specifically collected for your project. You could do that with a second project that collects (for example) all plant observations in the defined city area from a list of users who’ve signed up to the project. Once those are identified, they’d be captured by the first project (or not, if they’re not on the list of target species).
I don’t think anyone would have a problem with adding lots of invasive honeysuckle pictures to iNat - that’s what it’s for! An advantage of using iNat is that you’ll also capture existing observations - looks like there are 15 already in your area.
This covers our area and has an app: https://www.eddmaps.org/ and can also be good for reports of other invasives if people get interested in the more general issues. However, that’s very “dry” feeling to use.
INat- likely through a project you could set up, maintain, publicize- does seem like it could be more inviting to the community effort you have in mind. There are a number of “let’s document everything at our elementary school” type projects here, with a pretty low barrier to entry (by elementary school kids), so why not something like this too? I don’t know how fancy it can get with markers, but I have seen how press coverage works well with the site, eg https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/699004730/scientists-shocked-by-rare-giant-sunfish-washed-up-on-california-beach
Good luck with the project, wherever its ultimate home!
From what you’ve described, iNaturalist will work just fine for you, especially if you create a project for your geographic area of concern/interest. Your second criterion is exactly what a lot of the iNaturalist community does. You can further tweak your project to only include certain species or require particular observation fields. Here’s one I made, entirely for my own edification, that was restricted to one parcel of land and included only tree species of a certain trunk diameter: https://inaturalist.ca/projects/yonge-bloomington.
Thank you. The numerous responses explaining how projects work was the missing link for me. Clearly I did not appreciate iNaturalist’s many capabilities when I made my first post.
My next step will be to recruit a few other city residents to help me think through how we could make an iNaturalist project serve our purposes.
A very active community here, reach out with any questions or problems!
Heck, even iMap Invasives (at least the Oregon chapter) has projects on iNaturalist. They started out with a traditional project, then jumped to a collector project once they became available: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/oregon-imapinvasives-collector
I finally read the lottery’s article all the way to the end. Holy mola! That’s an impressive achievement for iNaturalist, and for attracting press coverage.
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