iNaturalist is undeniably useful for invasive species monitoring, but I have been curious about how to streamline the process of getting important observations in front of the natural resource managers that need them ASAP.
Some limitations I’ve encountered:
Manually checking a project or dashboard every day is very fun and could be effective enough if you can dedicate the time to it, but I’ve had conversations with a few colleagues that want email notifications specifically, since many natural resource managers do not get daily desktop time during peak field season. They also do not have the time to “advertise” themselves as someone that should be tagged when someone finds a certain invasive species in certain locations (though I have benefitted from that kind of community connection developing organically over time). So, projects and mentions alone would not be feasible in this case.
Subscribing to a taxon and place will put observations on your dashboard and daily update email, but only if the observation is identified to your subscribed taxon at the time of uploading. According to a Forum post from @tiwane and the general iNat Help page about Subscribing to a Taxon or Place, updates to an observation’s ID will not trigger a subscription notification. Many aquatic plants are initially identified incorrectly, for example, so this monitoring system alone would let many fall through the cracks. Although having a collection project would solve this problem and “grab” the observations that are ID’d to taxa of interest after uploading, the first bullet point summarizes why a project is not always a feasible tool either.
I regrettably do not know enough about scripts/API/computer science in general to develop some kind of external notification tool that finds project additions or updated IDs (to get the things that fall through the cracks; see above) and creates an email notification, if that sort of thing is even possible… (If you have any good resources for beginning to learn about these kinds of tools, please let me know! I am a big fan of the iNat tools by @glauber735, for example: iNaturalist Tools - Species Tracker, Lifelist, Achievements & More)
In summary, I am curious about whether others have thought about these things in the context of rapid response for invasive species monitoring and come up with something that works for their purposes. Specifically, I am wondering if there is any kind of subscription/project/code “wrangling” that can be done to make iNat email notifications address these specific limitations. Thanks for reading!
honestly, i think this would be the best way to do it, and i think this would be perfect job for a volunteer or group of rotating volunteers. at least in my area, there’s no shortage of people who are interested in helping to combat invasive species, and this sort of thing would require relatively small time commitment, can be done remotely, and is relatively flexible.
this is possible, but this is the sort of thing that i would do only in a case where volunteers who were doing this no longer could do this and replacements could not be found.
So we have the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) as our centralised biodiversity data base/aggregator that ingests records from all sources in the country (museum and herbarium specimens, iNaturalist, other citizen science platforms, state survey data, etc); it is the Australian node of GBIF.
Biosecurity agencies can sign up to the alerts program, and provide a list of taxa they’re interested in receiving alerts for; these may be species that are already known to occur in Australia but are high priority species for control, things expanding their range, etc, or they can be things that haven’t been detected yet in the country but are modelled/expected to appear at some point (due to eg high invasiveness, presence in surrounding countries). When/if a record of one of those taxa is ingested by the ALA, an automated email alert gets sent to the agency
Because iNat records are ingested into the ALA every single week, it tends to be the most rapid source of alerts (vs other data providers may only send data to the ALA one every few months, or once a year)
I believe it’s simple to build a system that checks for the latest reported invasive species in a specific area and sends a daily email. The only issue is that it would have some monthly costs for hosting and email sending (depending on the number of recipients).
Just an FYI as this has been mentioned before in iNatForum: there is a platform and associated smartphone app to track, report and be alerted about new sightings of non-native/invasive species or areas of interest. Alerts can be received via email or through the smartphone app (which can also be used to report such sightings). Information from iNaturalist is also imported into this platform although offhand I don’t know how often this is done (daily, weekly, monthly?), the data does have to be reviewed and verified before it is included in EDDMapS. I have seen my iNat invasive species eventually show up in EDDMapS.
That’s what my friends did on Hawai’i island, they have some homebrew python code which pulls data every so often and then filters it as they see fit.
I’m not sure that EDRR should necessarily be a native iNat feature since every user is going to have rather specific filters. do they want a whitelist of known species, any reports outside of that are EDRR; or a blacklist of known species they are searching for; how to filter out cultivated observations not marked as such, etc.
In the age of AI, building such a tool is rather easy
iMapInvasives is used by Pennsylvania (and AZ, ME, NY, and OR) to track invasive species- including rapid detection/response. I can’t speak about other states, but in PA resource managers from DCNR, PDA, and PNHP personnel get alerts and respond to records as-needed. Data are contributed via an app but also ingests observations from the iMap Invasives iNat project. It also stores/disseminates data on negative surveys and treatments/response.
More info: https://www.imapinvasives.org/faqwhat-is-imap
PA iNat Project: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/pennsylvania-imapinvasives
Yeah, you can ask the AI to build a script for that in minutes, it’s very simple. Now you can even use something like Grok Bot and ask it to run the script daily and print the list of observations, so you can access on the mobile app. Just be carefull to not overload the iNaturalist api . But a script that runs once per day and do one api call for that location is ok I believe.
You’re right, I should have included this in my original post. My colleagues and I do get these alerts from iMap in email format. I think I need to revisit the email notification options on iMap to see how customizable they are. Currently, I believe I only get notifications when certain species are reported for the first time within my jurisdictional areas, but I wouldn’t mind getting a notification for any observations from a list of species, not just first-timers.
I think a blind spot within the iNat-to-iMap framework is the idea of having observations initally ID’d on iNat to certain coarse-level taxonomic groups flagged so that my colleagues can more quickly ID to genus (e.g., native Elodea versus invasive Hydrilla or Egeria, all within Hydrocharitaceae). So many observations are identifiable to species but do not get found unless you manually look for them within the pools of observations identified as other species (I have experienced this also with a then-unknown infestation of Cabomba being misidentified for several years as a watermilfoil, which was already known in that jurisdiction, for example). But maybe this is where another tool/setup would be used concurrently to close this gap, like a project that automatically grabs observations ID’d within certain families that have native/invasive lookalike species, which someone will have to check consistently.
I picture an alert that says something like, “Someone made an observation of a species in Hydrocharitaceae in your jurisdiction – want to review it?”
this could be accomplished via a regular place+taxon subscription in iNaturalist. but i think this sort of highlights where tapping into a community of volunteers would allow you to get better information.
for example, suppose you’re already aware of and monitoring an infestation of an invasive plant in a particular body of water. do you really want to continue to receive notifications every time someone makes an observation of that plant in that body of water?
if human volunteers know that you’re already monitoring infestations in particular bodies of water, then they can do some initial screening and prioritize observations in new bodies of water or observations of taxa that you’re not already monitoring.
you could create a custom system to help you manage all the fine details of what you’re interested in, of course, but if one doesn’t already exist, it takes a lot of work to set it up properly and maintain it with the latest data, whereas humans are going to be able to understand what you’re looking for without you having to define every little detail. having humans in the loop also means that you will have that many more people who can actively look for things of interest IRL (and record things with enough detail). and when the time comes to remove a ton of invasives, the humans could also potentially be tapped to help remove them.