Using INaturalist as a monitoring tool

General
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I am Daniella and I work as the forest monitoring coordinator for an organization called restor.eco, on a project where we are evaluating the applicability of a variety of smartphone apps in monitoring forest restoration.

We recently started testing a few, including INaturalist, in a chronosequence of restoration areas in Ecuador but will do several more.

Anyhow, If you want to be in touch and share any field testing you may have done and want to exchange on experiences using it please write back!

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You might consider setting up photo posts if you’re using citizen science (or even if not) for monitoring purposes. This essentially a post that someone can rest a camera or a smartphone on to take a photo so that everyone is taking a photo from the same height and facing in the same way (a plaque on the post helps with this). it makes it vastly easier to do chronosequences.

@kueda might have some suggestions. If I recall he set something like this up on Mt Diablo in California back in 2013 or so, and may have some advice on how to best go about this.

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There is a great tool for something like this. Check out chronolog that has the exact thing earthknight mentioned only it makes it so anyone who finds the post can upload a picture.

I do not have personal experience with this tool but have heard about it being successful for some projects.

Good luck!

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@si_citizenscience @daniellaschweizer Welcome to the Forum.
This sound like a great thing. The place I explore has a huge range of seasons, and slow change. I have always wanted to create something that could track ecological changes through time (measured in years). This sounds good!

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Thank you Earthknight. I like the idea

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@mamestraconfigurata yes! It will be great to have a way to systematically monitor using this citizen science tool

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I find inat to be extremely useful for ecological inventory. Like a magical field notebook. Monitoring implies repeat visits over time… I feel like inat is less useful for monitoring over time. That being said with the right protocol it could definitely work.

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Thank you Charlie. We are going to be trying it systematically on our monitoring of restoration areas and see how it works for us.

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I’m interested in hearing how it works. Part of my job is monitoring wetland restoration projects. I do use inat to some extent when doing that work but not formally in that case.

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