Hi, In a couple of weeks I will be doing a presentation about iNat to a group of students in a climate change awareness related event. I was asked to talk about how iNat can help in studying the effect of climate change on organisms and their populations. I am kinda struggling with examples. I wan…

Maybe Lycosa singoriensis? It expanded far North in this century. Also you can check unusual southern Orthoptera species observations, some of them travel with trains, but others expand by themselves with no human help, I’m not n expert, but was told ther’s a full list of such species (I asked my fr…

Pied fly cather is breeding higher in the mountains due to climate change Several orthoptera species from the south Goose breeding in the artic, the season is much longer so many more Goose https://www.nemokennislink.nl/publicaties/verschuivingen-van-areaalgrenzen-van-insecten-onder-invloed-van-e…

Corn, Oats will grow higher, also in the Baltic states. Beech and Birch will grow higher (Boomgrens) Druiven, Grapes, Wine https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2019/05/tick-season-increasingly-begins-sooner-with-climate-change/

I don’t think iNat data will provide proof because there could be any number of factors involved in trends shown in the iNat record, but it will highlight areas and/or taxa that would be good candidates for more rigorous scientific study and investigation.

I think that in order to use iNat data as a reflection of the actually existing distributions of species, one first has to apply one of the many distribution models that attempt to account for biased sampling (ex: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ddi.12279 among others). It is a diffi…

This is just one example, but I thought this article on Giant Swallowtail northward expansion was interesting. They relied heavily on iNat data. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/868125v1

Seems like a relevant example here also: https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/19285-a-birder-s-observation-extends-the-range-of-a-fiddler-crab-by-240-km “The cause of this expansion, according to the paper, is likely El Niño events and warming temperatures”

It is important not to confuse the fact that certain species have broaden their distribution mainly due to their hability to adapt to different environmental conditions with the effect of climate change. It would also be important to ascertain if the observation of a given species outside its suppos…

short answer - It would not be scientifically accurate to use inat data in this way. It’s impossible to tell why a species expands it’s range most of the time, and this data is certainly not enough to know.

iNat collected data as a proof for climate change

Nature Talk

marina_gorbunova February 17, 2020, 3:54pm 5

Phaneroptera falcata goes up North to Leningrad Oblast, iNat even has an observation from there.

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iNat collected data as a proof for climate change

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