Everyone on the forum knows about iNaturalist, and I’m pretty sure everyone on the forum contributes to iNat, so I’m wondering: What other online Citizen Science projects do you contribute to?
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I have an eBird account, but I haven’t logged in since 2020
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eBird. BugGuide and BAMONA every once in a while, especially for rarer records.
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I’ve used eBird for a little over a year and really like it.
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I use eBird sometimes but that’s pretty much it.
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Does anyone know about something like iNat for rocks?
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The Kea Database, is a pretty cool way to be able to see what a large number of kea are up to. Reports can make it easier to track how and where various individuals move about. Without putting anything more than bands, on the hundreds of birds it tracks.
You can also look up the bands and see who you are seeing, where they were banded, and last sighting.
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I have an eBird account somewhere. Other than that I stick to iNat. I can contribute to BIMBY and NBSBC Bee Tracker and many others without having to leave the iNat platform. Learning a new platform just seems counterproductive.
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네이처링/ Naturing, a Korean citizen science site similar to iNaturalist.
A few differences present on Naturing:
Summary
- Observations need to have a taxon and habitat type selected before uploading, which can help in narrowing down names (only names within that taxa are displayed so no plant/animal mix-ups) and allow for more refined searches (riparian+crustaceans, marine+crustaceans, marsh+crustaceans, etc.).
- Information is pulled from Kakao so observations typically have data about the temperature, humidity, precipitation, and wind speed from that day/time.
- Instead of everyone inputting their own identification, agreements are made with a previously-submitted identification. So rather than Aa, Ab, Aa, Aa, Ab, Ab, Ab you would see Aa (+2), Ab (+3).
- There is a ‘like’ button on both observations and comments as well as a ‘favorite’ option.
- The only taxon level supported is species, so pretty much everything is either ‘Please Tell Me What This Is’ or a species identification. I have seen people leave comments regarding higher level taxonomic identifications but not all that often.
- It can be a headache to navigate binomial names. If a species went from being Aa bb to Cc bb you won’t be able to find the name in the database by searching Aa bb or Cc bb. You have to type Cc(Aa) bb. Not really an issue when using Korean common names though.
I prefer iNaturalist, but Naturing can sometimes be better for getting (quick) identifications of insects, spiders, plants, and fungi in Korea.
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I’m hoping to one day become a one-woman citizen science project lol
Try and help connect stuck scientist with each other in exchange for one small favour. Right now I’m considering what 20-year-old camera to cake with bubblewrap and mail to someone. I’ll buy one in a bundle so I can keep a spare.
Because his is suddenly useless to him and he’s trying to learn about Lucilia in China where most species are not even described yet.
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I did contribute to www kerbtier.de when I was still living in Germany… a page where expert identifiers will help you with your identification of beetles and in return use your data for maps and seasonality charts… and sometime your pictures to represent the species on the site.
Obviously I rarely contribute there anymore, but I do when I am on holiday in Germany … the feedback is super fast and I am amazed by the passion of those people running the page and love to support them when I can.
Other then that I use iNat only
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I’ve got BOINC running on my computer, working on Einstein@Home. It’s a lot like mining cryptocurrency, except rather than validating transactions, my computer processes data from radio telescopes, looking for unusual patterns and flagging them for a human to review.
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Like @Ajott said, I also use kerbtier for beetles when I’m in Germany. I like to fill their maps with my few observations.
Last year in France I uploaded my Lepidoptera to oreina.org. They have a map for each species with the departments. It was really nice to see, how the colour of “my” department changed, when I uploaded something which was new for the year - or even completely new for the department.
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Contribute, in the sense of helping to ID on FB nature groups.
Then linking back to the relevant iNat obs / taxon.
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Odonata Central is my other site. There were a couple of local projects that I really wanted to get involved with, but they seem to have imploded (or wrapped up without notice).
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I haven’t contributed yet but contributing to the Xerces Society Bumble Bee Watch is on my list. I have contributed to Adventure Scientists when they had their wild land pollinator research happening, as well as Cornell University’s FeederWatch, Great Backyard Bird Count, and (not from Cornell) Debris Tracker.. Pre-COVID, I rode with a team that was part of the Christmas Bird Count as a counter, not an identifier, lol.
If anyone is interested in other citizen/community science projects visit SciStarter. There is pretty much a project on any topic you might be interested in.
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Thanks for the reminder - I ‘exploited’ the expert knowledge of kerbtier.de; living in Austria, I could not contribute much to distribution data. But I will now upload some beetles from my recent Germany trip there to improve the database.
Other than that, my bird observations are provided via the ornitho platform/ Naturalist app (without the 'i’
) to BirdLife Austria or partner organizations in other countries
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UK people should look into FixMyStreet. They do commercial data analysis for clients like councils and road maintenance companies.
What’s your least fav pothole? They can help make it disappear, fast.
There’s also one (I don’t recall the name but they are THE national contractor so easy to Google) who does the same thing for supermarkets and also collect abandoned shopping trolleys. Their contracts say they should turn up to get any trolley anywhere in the UK within 24hrs, dunno how often they dont manage though.
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