Where, or how on iNat, to post wide-view images

I need to present somewhere a lot of photos showing the impact of creating a public path through bush, intended to be a means of experiencing the beauty and fascincation of a dense diverse canopy, understorey, ground cover and invertebrate fauna, but subsequently used a lot by joggers, cyclists and others oblivious to the species and vulnerability of the environment, to such an extent that those qualities have been lost from the tiny bit of space (public “Reserve”) available to them between road and housing.

The remaining revegetation is intermittently smothered by prunings cut and tossed aside in spontaneous “clearing of the track” by some of the users. In some cases the prunings are of locally rare and very slow-growing plants which have been observed inthat spot over 20 years. Loss of juvenile revegetation through pruning and trampling results in gradual loss of canopy density, weed invasion, and then requests from path-users for contracted spraying and - of all things - leaf-blowing! along the path through the forest.

So these are ecological, conservation, species-related observations, but the images required are longitudinal views along the path, which seldom allows for a good specimen shot. Sometimes I have loaded a longitudinal view with an additional image or images of one particular plant, but having the longitudinal, non-specific shot first, ie as the thumbnail, must be annoying for those interested in the species shot. And uploading a lot of these would be annoying to identifiers, as they have to click to the identifiable picture.

Also it takes a lot longer to make these observations than just posting the path view.

Any suggestions? Or is there another thread for this issue?

Powerpoint? Or the Google Docs equivalent? I think Open Office has a similar presentation package. iNat is more about the observation being for a single organism, and not really about paths. I almost think a go-pro on a cycle would give you a good video experience of the pathway…

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The presentation needs to be on the internet. And videos are beautiful, but take heaps of time to edit and are not nearly as quickly assimilable, bookmarked or referenced, for comparisons, side-by-sides of time, place, impacts.

My recent discovery of GPS-tagged photos has added a long-missing dimension to this process, and iNat allows me to publish the observations once only, and anyone to refer to them as needed.

Videos or print presentations take a lot of time to create, and are fixed, so need to be tailored for the audience and new ones created continually. What I want is something like iNat that is intended for showing nature, habitats, plant communities, etc. Soil and water too, because they are the basis of it. I often find an observation is focused on a pool or stream, decomposing plant material, or soil, and am about to upload it, then I remember a stream or pile of decomposing weeds or an area of soil is not an organism. Making that distinction does not come naturally to me!

Pre-iNat, I found the quickest way to file and reference a vast amount of such data was named photo files in multi-levels of named folders, and a programme that can search and open them quickly and easily. I have a domain name and access to a local server. I haven’t used either for years, because I don’t know html and none of the programmes I’ve found, eg Wordpress, allow the presentation of lots of text and data quickly. They seem to have a format already laid out and you have to use it. I used to have a programme that turned text into html, and could upload images any size, wherever on the page I wanted, as many pages, text or image boxes as needed. The links and hyperlinks were very easy to make. But that software (I think it was called ClarisHomepage or something) became obsolete with an OS upgrade about 15 years ago. Is there anything like that now? Preferably for Mac?

have you tried an ESRI story map? Not sure if youhave to pay for a license or something but there may also be an open source equivalent.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/

Hi Charlie, I am looking at that weblink now. It looks very promising so far, and I have signed up for what seems to be a free “Public” Account for non-commercial personal use.
Thank you for the info!

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here’s a nice one we have:
https://vtanr.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapTour/index.html?appid=02c6944d246e4b70b0db02660912f754#

Excellent, thanks Charlie. I’ll keep exploring it.
One tip I found online for a problem I experienced straight away, apparently linked to images created on phones…portrait-oriented image rotates on upload to landscape. Solution: save image file on hard disc (ie re-save, in my case at least) before uploading.

And your link shows a good example of the power of a few images, versus hours of telephoning, emailing, making submissions, trying to convey a place with unrecognised value and needs, as evident in existing practices, policies, contracts etc. It is so frustrating trying to describe a place to technical officers and managers who have never been there, esp. when its a small area of regenerating subtropical rainforest hidden in the middle of a city, used for exercise by a large population expecting the convenience of access and type of landscaping expected in urban parks.

Leaf-blowing is, I believe, beneficial to neither ecology nor bushwalkers in an evergreen forest, with almost no deciduous trees in our local climate, in a clay soil already suffering from compaction by walkers, joggers and cyclists, and kauri dieback occurring a few kilometres away in an area with public paths (currently closed to reduce risk of the disease spreading).

Spraying broad-spectrum herbicides for both monocots and dicots along the 2km length of a 1-metre wide path through dense diverse forest seems to me not only hazardous to plant health but counter-producitve, when the most beautiful and usable, ie not boggy or slippery, forest paths I have experienced locally have a surface of deep leaf litter, mosses, native grasses and/or ground covers, over a dense mat of tree roots.

Edited for typos and tone.

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