I’m trying to learn more about how to become a naturalist. I’ve had trouble finding any useful sources online. Anyone have any useful methods for performing species ID in the field?
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Answers will likely vary a bit base on your taxa of focus. Get field guides / keys for your taxa of interest in your area of interest (availability will vary by taxa and location). Try to get as comprehensive a guide as possible (typically easy for something like birds, but much harder for something like insects).
The first thing you want to learn is the anatomical structures that are most often used for an ID. Most field guides have illustrations near the front. Learning these will allow you to navigate the the guides more easily and will also help when looking at ID information elsewhere (such as online).
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This is a very general question… do you have a specific taxon that you are interested in?
Here’s an example of a Master Naturalist program requirements if that’s what you mean: https://extension.umd.edu/programs/environment-natural-resources/program-areas/master-naturalist-program/become-master-naturalist/
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Professional? Formal qualification and paid work?
A science degree and an employer?
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Yes, that is what I’ve been researching.
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It would be helpful to know more about your background. Also, the title of this post should probably be edited if you are specifically interested about employment.
At the moment I’m not focusing much on employment; I’m trying to learn more about the details of naturalism.
I don’t know that anyone would use the word “naturalist” for a profession. The term would be “field ecologist” or something.
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It is a profession I’ve done a lot of research on it
Depending on your level of education (current or future), you could look for jobs as a field technician, field biologist, biological technician, or the like. I’ve not seen job offerings that use the word naturalist, but the idea is the same. Generally such jobs require some specific skill: ichthyology/fisheries, ornithology, herpetology, etc. Companies hire individuals with bio experience for a variety of things, including surveys/inventories. Agencies also hire techs. I’m guessing we are not talking about a path in academia where you’d be a student although you could be hired as a research tech for a professor. The best way to learn what you need to know is to contact those who are already doing it or volunteer with individuals who are conducting the work you’re interested in.
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the professional naturalists that i know are basically nature educators. they know a lot of general stuff about nature, and they might have some deeper knowledge about particular subjects that they’re interested in, but they’re not really scientists.
interestingly, the way i’ve seen them identify things that they’re unfamiliar with is to use Seek or iNaturalist to suggest an identification or to ask others what they think it is.
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This is a hard question to answer because there are probably many techniques that different people use in different situations. When first starting out, dichotomous keys are essential for learning what the relevant traits are and where differences between taxa exist. However, at some point the key is not needed because one does one (or both) of two things: recognize the subject as taxon X or remember the traits that define taxon X. These are sometimes confused as the same thing, but they are not. Recognition just means I know it when I see it, but I can’t tell you what about it is important. Remembering is usually associated with recognition, but now I can verbalize WHY I recognize it as that thing. To get to the remembering phase takes YEARS, literally, years and years of practice, practice, practice. So the short answer to your question how do naturalists identify….reading up on the relevant identification traits, application of that knowledge, and lots and lots of repetition with the last part being especially important. You will lose it if you don’t use it, but with repetition and refinement you can get better, much better so that it becomes second nature, which is when it’s mostly just recognition and remembering the name with the thing you recognize. To get there though, field guides, keys, formal taxonomic coursework, and experience all play a role…there is no shortcut to the hardwork necessary, but by starting early you can get good, so hang in there and practice, practice, practice.
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I know a naturalist when I see one, even if I don’t have my dichotomous key handy. ;-)
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@Raf, I’m not sure if you know who @petezani is, but just to give you some context, he kind of came slowly into iNaturalist, and he is now one of the most enthusiastic taxon specialists x academic users, and he has written extensively on the forum about the benefits of using iNaturalist
So he is giving you free advice about multiple things:
- How naturalists make IDs
- Tips for becoming a naturalist
- How to use iNaturalist for brain training
- How to use that brain training to become successful and indispensable as a naturalist
- Etc.
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I’m going to try to give you a more general answer. I’m sorry if it is too basic, but I’m not sure what information you need.
For every group of living things, scientists called taxonomists have made decisions about what the species are and what characteristics, (often called traits) can be used to tell them apart. I won’t go into how these decisions are made, debated, changed, etc. After these decisions are made, the taxonomists have to write down their evidence, thought process, and so on and publish it so that scientists around the world can look at it and (hopefully) agree on telling those species apart based on those traits.
The key thing to know about this with reference to your question is that the traits that are used to tell species apart can be almost anything. Sometimes it is color pattern, or overall shape, or arrangement of parts, or the shape of a particular part, or the number of hairs on the fourth segment of the rearmost genital, or simply a genetic difference between two populations. And so what we naturalists have to look at to tell the difference between species, and whether that is even possible from photos, depends almost entirely on which group of living things we are looking at. There are two lizard species where I live that can most easily be told apart by the color of their eyes, but people who know them well can also tell by their scales. Also near me there are mushrooms that can only be told apart by extracting DNA, and other mushrooms that can be distinguished by how they smell. For many groups of organisms, you have to look at several different traits simultaneously to know what species you have, and in these cases dichotomous keys are essential.
No one in the world knows, or could know, what traits to look at to tell every species from every other species. There are too many species distinguished by too many different traits. But the iNat community is probably the best place in the world to go to find someone who can help you figure out how to ID whatever species you are currently trying to ID. A discussion on some of the ID methods used by some very knowledgeable identifiers is here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identification-tips-for-ids/29796
There are people here who can ID most birds from a photo of a single feather. We have identifiers who know oaks so well they can tell you which three species hybridized to produce the leaf in question. And so on.
That said, there are still many groups that are vastly under IDed. For example, in my area very few caddisfly observations ever get an identification more exact than caddisfly. So there is definitely the opportunity to become the expert identifier in something if you pick a group that others aren’t focused on, and doing so is really useful.
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Thanks that was very helpful
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