There are circumstances in which absence of evidence is evidence of absence, at least in a probabilistic sense. RationalWiki explains it.
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Jack, I am also attempting to capture the biodiversity in my small neck of the woods. I moved here a little over two years ago and walk our trails and fields in our nature preserves, and sometimes our neighborhood streets. It is a snapshot in time - hopefully someday, someone can use it as a reference. We have so many new housing districts going in, maybe it will be of value. I am mostly going after individual species, but I thought about just starting to observe individual trees, especially our Valley Oaks, as they seem to be under stress and many do not appear to be in good health. I think you may have given me a new personal project.
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Great idea! In a sense, every observation made on iNat today helps establish a baseline against which future changes due to climate change and loss of habitat can be compared tomorrow.
Maybe instead of climate change, it would be helpful to have an extreme weather observation field or project which helps document the the short term drastic change.
Also, sorry about your health.
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Yes, this is so very true. Our system here is in a state of flux which would be great to document through landscape photos. The old Valley Oaks are dying at what I think are an alarming rate. And in other places the beaversâ engineering are altering the riparian areas by felling primarily willows, many of which are quite large, killing the evergreen oaks due to high water along the streams, and the replacement of grassland with flooded lands full of cattails. And this is all happening in the span of just a few years. I believe landscape photographs would illustrate these changes better than individual species observations.
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