Dear tree planters
I’m exploring ways of introducing inat as a tool for documenting community tree planting activities and looking for ideas from Naturalists engaged in tree planting campaigns.
I see iNaturalist as a means to record the effects of planted trees on local biodiversity such as nesting birds, the rate of growth of the trees and the pollinators, pests, lichens and fungi that interact with the trees. This umbrella project has been created to bring together Community Tree Planting projects, https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/tree-planting-worldwide
If you would like to add your community tree planting project to this umbrella please message @roadsidetreesserowe or @botswanabugs and provide the name of your project.
If this project is duplicating an already existing umbrella project, please let me know.
Just for clarity. Am I correct in asuming the trees that are being planted are endemic trees, within their natural ecozone? Not cultivars or decorative?
iNat can be used for documenting both endemic and nonnative planted trees, but all planted trees need to be marked as “cultivated” by ticking a thumbs down to the “organism is wild” field in the DQA.
Trees could be endemics, cultivars or exotics though since all the trees are planted they will all be casual observations. It will be interesting to see which planted trees do become problematic invasive trees in the future ! I think its good to have a record of tree planting even if the tree planting has bad effects like cracks in roads and pathways. The problems caused by planting trees can be documented using iNat as well as th benefits.