We hope everyone had a great start to 2024. Here are our January highlights! Our hidden theme for this week are files 🪰. If you missed last month's highlights, you can catch up here.

Species Discoveries

New species described
Listen to @johnmanning share the story of describing a new species of South African iris from a posting by @alexanderr.

🪰 This article describes a new species of Alaskan snakeworm described by @dssikes, @pereiratpl and colleagues and the role their iNaturalist project played in the discovery.

Lost species rediscovered
Re:Wild has been using iNaturalist as part of their effort to relocate lost species. This interesting article describes a recent publication summarizing their progress. So far, 27% of species on the list published in the study are represented by observations in their iNaturalist project.

Range Extensions and Distributions

Range Extensions

• This article describes @jggbrown, @kevinthiele and @mftasp’s discovery of the first known population of a rare violet from Tasmania.
• This study by @collinst, @dougvg, @frankiecoburn, and @acschneider documented the first disjunct Arizona population of a plant found in New Mexico.
• This study by @makario, @angel-romero, and colleagues used an observation by @antshrike69 to document the first known occurrence of a South American snake in Central America.

Improving Distributions
iNaturalist is increasingly used as the basis for studies to increase our basic understanding of species biogeography and diversity. For example, @k_jiaranaisakul and colleagues used iNaturalist records to fill out distribution maps for 14 species of lanternflies from Thailand. This month we highlight biogeography studies using iNaturalist data on:

• Plants from Uzbekistan
• Phloeidae Bugs from South America
• Arachnids from Cuba
• and Rays from Fiji

Invasive Species Science

A study published this month by @flo_grattarola and colleagues used 15 years of iNaturalist records to track the spread of invasive sea fig across Uruguay.

• There was another article on an invasive crayfish population in Canada and the role @drcrayfish played in identifying it.
• 🪰 @rodrigo_barahona_13 and colleagues studied the spread of a Woodlouse parasitizing fly in Chile with the help of an iNaturalist project

There were many other invasive species studies leveraging iNaturalist this month including studies on:

• The spread of Chinese Tallow and invasive moths in Florida
• An invasive beetle in South Africa
• Invasive plants in Russia in two studies here and here
• An invasive plant in Ukraine
• An invasive plant in Arkansas

Conservation and Monitoring

We were able to make our own case for how iNaturalist spurs conservation in a Revelator article this month.

As the southern hemisphere summer continues, we saw more stories this month from the New Zealand Government and about South African National Parks on using iNaturalist to help scale their limited monitoring capacity for conservation. The stories are connected with two of iNaturalist’s most prolific community members with the former profiling @jon_sullivan and the latter co authored by @tonyrebelo.

Protected Area management

• This study by @eric_tigrerito and colleagues assessed use of iNaturalist for protected area monitoring and management in Mexico.
• Similarly, this study by @lcmarinho1 and colleagues explored the use of iNaturalist for monitoring in a Brazilian State Park.
• This story about a The Nature Conservancy preserve in Michigan highlights the role iNaturalist plays in communicating the value of preserves to the public through showcasing the biodiversity that has been observed within them.

Restoration and Stewardship

• This article by @wncbotany describes a vision for regenerating landscapes for biodiversity and the role that iNaturalist plays.

Climate Change Science

iNaturalist is helping us understand how a warmer world is impacting biodiversity. This story describes winter bioblitzes that @ihz2 and colleagues are conducting to understand the effects of warmer winters in the finger lakes region.

This story features @jtanney0's work to understand the spread of sooty-bark disease to drought stricken trees in a warming Victoria through their project.

Warm water events off the Pacific Coast led to the spread seastar wasting disease. This story describes how @rbank and colleagues are using iNaturalist to monitor the spread of and recovery from this disease.

Many species undergo seasonal migrations that are complicated by climate change. This story describes the listing of Monarch butterflies in Canada as endangered and accompanying efforts to ramp up monitoring using iNaturalist by @carolyncallaghan and colleagues at the Canadian Wildlife Federation. This study used iNaturalist data to better understand the timing of Monarch migrations in California.

On the topic of climate change and species migrations, we enjoyed this article by @frances_figart about unexpected vagrants showing up in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Species interaction Science

iNaturalist images are valuable not just for documenting a single organism in space and time but also for documenting interactions between organisms and all sorts of other "secondary data" as described in this study. This month there were three great stories that used iNaturalist to better understand interactions between birds and food plants.

• The first was a study that used iNaturalist images to reveal a more diverse diet for the endangered Red-bellied Macaw than was previously known.
• The second story was a about the mysterious paralysis of lorikeets in Australia and the iNaturalist project that @david4262 and colleagues are using to determine which food plant may be poisoning the birds.
• Lastly, @emilymstone wrote a great article about her travels in Hawaii and the interaction between the endemic Nene goose and the endemic blueberry relatives they feed on.

iNaturalist Impact on iEcology and AI Research

This revolution that allows scientists to access species interactions and other secondary data contained in nature photographs like those described in the previous section is driven by the availability of large volumes of nature photography and new AI tools to efficiently pull out patterns from these images for analysis.

We’ve been calling this the Phenotypic Revolution, but from this study we learned a new term for it: iEcology (internet ecology). In the study, researchers used iNaturalist images to characterize the global shift in hermit crabs from using shells to using plastic trash as homes and the impacts on behavior and evolution.

Meanwhile,

• iNaturalist continues to be used as a standard benchmarking dataset for evaluating new AI and machine learning techniques such as those described in papers by Xiao and colleagues and by Kim and colleagues. These studies benefit iNaturalist by developing new concepts that we can integrate into our infrastructure as these experiments by @alexshepard show.
• Lastly, long time iNaturalist collaborator @gvanhorn and colleagues describe new research to combine Computer Vision and Large Language Models in this study.

iNaturalist data and model quality

Improving data quality is a very important piece of iNaturalist's strategy for increasing our impact. Accuracy as a key feature alongside ease-of-use evaluated in many reviews of identification apps such as three that came out this month here, here, and here. Likewise data accuracy is very important for iNaturalist’s use by the scientific community as explained in this study by @edulg. We are now complementing our monthly model updates with monthly data accuracy assessments allowing us to quickly learn and iterate on accuracy improvements.

iNaturalist’s Human Health and Social Science Impact

Participating in iNaturalist doesn’t just help species; it also helps humans. Here are three ways:

• Getting outside and connecting with nature even in winter is good for you as eloquently described by @marieviljoen in this article describing her winter iNaturalist finds. Likewise, this article has tips on how iNaturalist can help get your kids outdoors this winter.
• An increasing number of people are finding foraging as a gateway for connecting them to nature. This article provides some tips for how iNaturalist can help and this study uses an iNaturalist project to understand urban foraging.
• While some things in nature are healthy, others are unhealthy. This toxicology study uses iNaturalist to better understand stinging caterpillars in the United States. Likewise, this article mentions iNaturalist in the context of threats from venomous snakes in Australia.

🪰 This article explains how some flies, like the Australian blowfly, are harmful to agriculture while others, like the Australian hoverfly, are beneficial against a beautiful backdrop of fly photography from @acerad.

On the social science front, there was more work this month from @guiming and colleagues on understanding community patterns within the iNaturalist social network.

iNaturalist Events

As covered here, this month marked the 10 year anniversary of the Vermont Atlas of Life, one of the longest running projects on iNaturalist. Congratulations to @kpmcfarland and the entire Vermont Center for Ecostudies team!

January events included bioblitzes in the southern California mountains described here and a project by @johnslowry and colleagues to document biodiversity on Prince Edward Island covered here and here.

iNaturalist’s Education Impact

This profile on @cpavlisich describes using iNaturalist in STEM teaching activities at the Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center. Other uses of iNaturalist in education settings include:

• This story on documenting mushrooms on an Indonesian university campus.
• And this study on using iNaturalist for student activities related to the Mounds of Central Polissia in Ukraine.

iNatters in the News

During a stop on her adventures sailing around the world making iNaturalist observations, @mandapanda made such an impression snorkeling off Greece in December that she was covered by the local news. If you don’t speak Greek, we definitely recommend having your browser translate the article and give it a read. Other iNatters in the news this month included:

• This great video of @alan_rockefeller discussing mushroom photography and his excellent hat choice.
• 🪰 @sherylsr from Texas Parks and Wildlife wrote this excellent story on the wonder of flies!
• In Southern California, @ibhappy’s kestrel observation was featured as iNaturalist Spotting of the Month while this story highlight’s @gregwatson passion for desert reptiles.

Thank you to everyone who participated in iNaturalist this January and we look forward to a busy 2024 - your support makes it all possible!

Donate to iNaturalist

This is the twenty-second entry in an ongoing monthly (or almost monthly!) series profiling the amazing identifiers of iNaturalist.

The island of Madagascar is currently home to over 167k verifiable observations of over 10k species on iNaturalist, and David Rabehevitra (@davidrabehevitra) has added identifications to nearly 25k of them, making him the top identifier for this famously biodiverse place. 

Born and raised in Madagascar, David is currently studying the distribution of Tahina spectabilis, a Critically Endangered palm species, and became interested in nature from “being a scout and drawer/photographer from a young age.”

I loved traveling and living in the open air since I was a child, and loved growing things in my little garden. Since then my dream was to have a job that allows me to travel and discover as many places as possible in Madagascar, and around the world later on. When I got my bachelor degree I needed to decide which subject to study when entering university. I chose natural sciences first because it would at least get me close de nature, I then chose to study botany because I felt it would fulfill my dreams of traveling at least around Madagascar.

David joined RBG Kew Madagascar in 2016, where he first found out about iNat, and was later appointed as admin of the Zavamaniry Gasy (Plants of Madagascar) project. He tries to identify Madagascar plant observations on a daily basis.

I add identifications and comments on other users' observations for the pleasure of helping first: helping the platform to improve, helping and guiding others to go further in their research, helping the knowledge of Madagascar's flora and its conservation. I get the reward of a greater knowledge and capacity to recognize taxa from all over Madagascar!

I look at newly added observations, within which I scroll through all the available ones. Then I process from the most finely identified observations (species level) to the least (kingdom). I use The Flora of Madagascar, JSTOR, Plants of the World Online, the Tropicos Madagascar Project and my own database as resources when identifying.

In addition to sharpening his plant identification skills, David uses iNaturalist to gather distribution information for IUCN redlisting. 

The process of establishing The Red List of the Trees of Madagascar, in which I actively participated, used available data, including research grade observations from iNaturalist/Zavamaniry Gasy Project to realise the jump from 379 assessments in 2017 to the 3,000 plus assessments in 2021. I contributed to the identification of a relatively high number of observations to make them Research Grade and therefore usable in the IUCN process. I presented the evidence of this contribution of iNaturalist during a talk in the Madagascar ATBC session in 2019.

(Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- when making observations of plants, David recommends taking “high visibility photographs and as much as needed! It requires the identifier to be in the shoes of the observer to make the identification as accurate as possible.” So try to get photos of leaves, flowers, and fruit, often from a few angles, as well as a wider shot showing the plant in full if possible.

- take a look at the most-faved plant observations in Madagascar!

- an observation of a rare Euphorbia plant in Madagascar by @fabienrahaingo, and identified by David, was iNaturalist’s Observation of the Week back in 2017!

Our Observation of the Week is the first Porcellio ombrionis posted to iNaturalist, seen in Spain by @amaneko!

Amanhuy Duque and Andrea Castro (who have the @amaneko account) are both biologists from the Canary Islands, and they specialize in terrestrial biodiversity and conservation. Amanhuy, who is quoted in this piece, tells me that he’s been fascinated by animals for as long as he can remember. 

My parents always took me for walks in nature and this helped raise awareness about its conservation and the importance of knowing how to look. From that early age it was clear to me that I wanted to be a biologist when I grew up, and that’s what I ended up doing. 

In Andrea's case, she always had an interest in nature and biology, but her true passion, birds, was discovered during her studies. She learned to mix it with her passion for drawing to make some incredible illustrations.

Last month, Amanhuy visited the island of El Hierro with his family.

I had cut myself on a piece of glass on my foot a few days before, so while they were finishing the walk I took the opportunity to search the area some interesting species to photograph. 

One of the species that caught my attention the most that I found on this walk was this Porcellio woodlouse that showed striking ornamentation. I took several photos trying to show the important characteristics for later determination and the rest was the work of the small group of researchers and isopod specialists who discussed the ID of this observation.

El Hierro is the second-smallest island in the archipelago, and it is both the one with the fewest number of observations on iNaturalist and one of the least studied at a scientific level. Just in two small trips to the island, including this one, a dozen new records have emerged (which will have to be verified in most cases with the collection of some individuals). 

I reached out to one of those identifiers, @pepe_rando, about his identification and this observation. Pepe tells me there are twenty-three known species of Porcellio in the Canary Islands, most of which are endemic. 

Porcellio ombrionis is only present (at least so far) in El Hierro and La Gomera. It was first described by Albert Vandel in 1954. It is characterized (to the naked eye) mainly by its granulations, which are distributed all over the body, and are quite developed. And by its head lobes (the three "horns" the animal has on the head), specially the central one, which in this species is quite developed and curved upwards. This last characteristic is what made me rethink my ID of the observation. I had originally thought that it was Porcellio studienstiftius, which is an extremely similar species, but smaller, and with a central lobe that is not as developed, but when I took a second look at the second picture, it is fairly clear that this specimen's central lobe is way too developed for it to be Porcellio studienstiftius. In general, both species are characteristic enough to automatically rule out any other species from the islands, so it had to be one of those two.

Oniscideans are an often overlooked group. Maybe this observation is only relevant to a few of us who are addicted to looking at pictures of these creatures for hours trying to figure out exactly what species exactly they are, but I like to think it will be useful for anyone who wants to look for the species in the future, be it to study it, or just for pure pleasure (as is the case with me), and can now do so through these pictures. This observation is (most likely) the first picture ever taken of this species. Maybe seeing pictures of these unique species, rather than some drawings from seventy-five years ago, will spark interest in protecting them, seeing as arthropods are usually underrepresented when it comes to conservation efforts. Many of the Oniscidea species from the Canary Islands still have no pictures that can be found online, but just recently, thanks to iNaturalist, we now have pictures for 8 species (1 Ctenorillo and 7 Porcellio).

Amanhuy and Andrea joined iNaturalist just over two years ago.

We discovered iNaturalist a bit by chance, when finishing our master’s degrees. We started by identifying some photos that Andrea had taken over the years and soon I was hooked and ended up buying a camera so I could take photos too. iNaturalist has managed to increase the love we have for nature and, especially in my case, it has made it our obsession to search, investigate and photograph the different species we have on our islands. 

We owe much of the knowledge about the species we have in our territory, especially arthropods, to iNaturalist and the wonderful people who participate in this platform. I have spent hours reading scientific articles and interpreting keys just to try to identify some of the species we have photographed. We are generalists in terms of the species we photograph, although we have more interest in fauna than flora. Andrea has a special interest in birds, while I have found small life both in the sea and on land fascinating, with a special weakness for nudibranchs and the fly families Asilidae and Tephritidae, as well as lace bugs.

(Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity. Photo of Andrea is above, Amanhuy below.)

- some iNat users are part of the American Isopod and Myriapod Group (AIMG), which has some excellent tips for photographing isopods for identification! Check out their project.

- take a look at the First Known Photographs of Living Specimens project on iNaturalist!