Hello! Are you an INaturalist user, who happens to be Catholic? Do you have an interest in helping to catalogue the biodiversity on the lands of the largest non governmental landowner in the world? Then please check out the Saint Kateri Conservation Center’s INaturalist project to track biodiversity observations on Catholic lands {churches, schools, colleges/universities, retreat/conference centers}:
The Church owns over 170 million acres of land, and there are over 1 billion Catholics in the world. Imagine how much scientific information we could obtain that could be used for conservation purposes, if even 1% of these people used INaturalist on these lands?
We are posting here to start a movement. If you’re interested in participating, here are some ways that you could help us: 1) Please spread the word!
2) Record observations at your local parish, Catholic school or university.
3) Recruit more iNaturalist users.
4) Help organize a Bio blitz on a Catholic owned property you are associated with.
5) Join our Saint Kateri project (the first project in the umbrella) as a member.
6) If you don’t see your Catholic owned property on our list, let us know, and we will be happy to add it!
Hmmm… are only Catholics allowed on such properties? You may get a better response if you consider giving your post a new title. It feels a bit weird as is.
… And, Welcome to the Forum! Good luck with your biodiversity investigations on the church properties.
Edit: Oh, I see someone already changed it while I was writing - it seems more appropriate now
Moderator note: I edited the title from “Catholics wanted” to “Documenting biodiversity on Catholic lands” to make it more clearly connected to iNaturalist from the title alone.
I happen to live near Catholic University in Washington, DC and have made many observations on their property as a visitor. Welcome, Kat, and thanks for encouraging the Catholic community to document biodiversity!
I was looking to see if there was a global dataset that included all Catholic owned lands as shapefiles, as that would make it possible to set up a collections type project to do this automatically, but there doesn’t appear to be one as of yet. There are shapefiles for diocese & parishes globally (see below), but none I could find that include lands specifically owned by the Catholic church.
However, there is an interesting site called GoodLands with the goal of finding way to better and more sustainably manage Catholic lands. They have environmental (and other) GIS data concerning things like biodiversity and such within diocese around the world, as well as other non-environmental information.
Yes - there is not yet a shapefile of this nature! We do have it for some counties and states where free parcel data is available. We are trying to come at this from the top down and bottom up. Adding projects where we have motivated partners, and also trying to bring in parcel data. I am a GIS coordinator by day for another non-profit, so this has definitely been on my mind, and GoodLands is a partner of ours!
Thank you so much! The title was a quick and dirty attempt. Definitely not trying to exclude anyone who is not Catholic - it was more to not offend those who may not want to participate because it is Catholic @teellbee. Thank you for changing it to be more reflective of the ask, and thank you for the warm welcome!
I see you are missing all the the St. Thomas Universities in North America. The one closest to me does not strictly speaking “own” most of its lands, but it is a very long lease. https://www.stu.ca/campustour/
For those of other denominations, consider doing this on the Episcopal Conference Centers, the Lutherhavens, and suchlike properties of your particular faith community.
I happen to know that there is quite a lot of biodiversity on the Episcopal Conference Center for the Diocese of Georgia, out there in Waverly.
Not long ago there was a post asking how iNat could better take into account and integrate the black community, so in this case I am hoping you can also listen to, and perhaps take into account, the Native American perspective.
I do not intend to insult anyone, but as a Lakota, the title gave me a very bad impression and I almost felt insulted as I read on.
Firstly, the term “Catholic lands” is not appropriate because the lands are not Catholic — the lands happen to be currently owned by the Catholic church, which is a major difference. The “largest non governmental landowner in the world” is not something to be proud of, taking into consideration how they came about to it. And I also disagree that this is “encouraging the Catholic community to document biodiversity”, because in reality it is encouraging division, and basically setting apart one of the worst predators in the world as something “special”. (At least where I live, the worst animal rights offenders are precisely Catholics, because they consider animals to be completely inferior, objects to be used and mistreated, and not worthy of any respect. And I won’t even mention the Catholic church’s transgressions against Native Americans through generations…)
I can understand where this pretends to go, but from a non-Catholic perspective, this project is implying a division based on religion and land “ownership”, which I would hope iNaturalist wouldn’t want to encourage.
May I suggest —at the very minimum— to change the title yet again, for the sake of all of us non-Catholics that still feel very weird about it?
I’ve unlisted this topic and will keep it closed, mainly because the forum isn’t meant to be a place to promote projects. Thank you for sharing your views, everyone, and I’ll just note that the original poster wrote a message to the forum moderators and wanted to clarify that they’re part of
an organization that has Indigenous peoples on our board, and we hope to facilitate giving some of these lands back to tribes. I recognize that I posted this in haste and wasn’t sensitive enough. We are trying to get everyday Catholics to care about biodiversity and the traditional ecological knowledge of Native Americans.