If it says it was newly introduced does that mean that its not native? Im just curious because Im doing a project for my Junior Docent program at the Desert Museum and I thought iNaturalist would be a good area to start for helping me with my project. The project Im doing is to show diversity in the Sonoran desert with the geckos and when I saw this black Mediterranean gecko I wasnt sure if It was a new one or if they could change colours to camouflage, or if it was related to temperature.
(Im sorry if I used the wrong tag for this Ive never used the forums before and It seemed like it would be helpful for getting feedback and about that explanation point and saying it was newly introduced)
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Welcome to the forum!
I haven’t seen anything explicitly mentioning new introductions, but if you’re seeing something like this, then yes that just means it’s not native.
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Thank you so much. I have one more question though, is there a way to find out where they came from if they have that tag?
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Haha that’s always what I want to know too. The About sections of species pages link to Wikipedia pages, which often have where they’re native to.
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Oo Ill have to look at it when I get home. My school blocked wiki so I cant use it currently but thank you
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Ohh ok Ill go there thank you
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Although possibly not a good approach with all species, I will often enlarge the map and back out to a more global perspective to see where the greatest concentration is. The European Starling fails this test. The Canada Goose nearly fails. The Common Wall Lizard does pass.
I suppose if a species were more successful in its introduced location, it too would fail.
Sometimes too one may see where there are organisms that are completely out of normal range and on closer inspection are possibly/likely misidentified.
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Something to keep in mind is that many introduced species don’t have that tag. It’s not an automatic feature, someone has to manually add it, so many species that should have it don’t.
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Probably everything introduced to USA will fail just because of amount of observations there.
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These two sites are useful for that:
They’re not 100% complete, but they’re a useful resource.
For plants KEW’s Plants of the World Online is a good resource for determining broad native origin regardless of species.
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