Tad Arensmeier/Flickr

Tad Arensmeier photographed this Yellow-Blotched Palm-Pitviper for iNaturalist.

The organizers of a new effort to catalog the world’s reptiles want to enlist you and your iPhone for their cause. The Global Reptile Bioblitz launched last month and aims to collect amateur observations of every species of reptile on Earth — all 9,413 of them. The project is the sister effort of the Global Amphibian Bioblitz which launched earlier this summer and, thanks to submissions from citizen scientists around the world, has already collected photos of more than 700 of the nearly 7,000 known amphibian species on the planet.

The observations are all logged at iNaturalist.org, an online citizen science community with more than 2,000 members who’ve cumulatively logged more than 30,000 field observations of species ranging from redwoods to coyotes.Observations can be uploaded to the site directly, or through an iPhone app, also called iNaturalist, which was launched earlier this year. Since we first reported on it back in January, the app has been downloaded more than 3,000 times, according to its developer Ken-ichi Ueda.

Scott Loarie, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science who is coordinating both the reptile and the amphibian initiative says that it’s critical to document reptile and amphibian populations around the world because they are changing rapidly, due to climate change, habitat loss, disease, and irresponsible collecting.

He said iNaturalist is making a critical connection in this effort, by allowing amateurs to share photos, and connecting them with experts who can identify the species.

Jeff Winget/iNaturalist

Photo of a western painted turtle, one of thousands of "citizen science" field observations uploaded to the iNaturalist website

“The Flickr and Facebook communities, which are really outside the academic efforts, are sharing photos ferociously,” said Loarie. “With iNaturalist, there’s the ability to turn these casual photos into real data points for scientists, and that’s really exciting.”

Loarie said a new pilot project between iNaturalist and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species illustrates this point.  The IUCN is considered the world’s main authority on the conservation status of species, and it aims to have the status of every species evaluated every five-to-ten years. Starting this week, iNaturalist will be powering the distribution maps on the new IUCN Amphibian Specialist Group site.

According to Loarie, iNaturalist will not only provide the technology for the IUCN to have interactive, dynamic maps. It will also provide citizen science data that can help update the species distributions and in that way, potentially affect conservation action and policy.

“Every observation can confirm the existence of these species in these locations,” said Loarie. “This way the IUCN can say ‘This is our range map. Are we right or not?’”

“One of the problems with citizen science is that there’s been a high barrier to entry.  You really have to be highly skilled,” said Loarie. “But what the Internet has done, with its culture of sharing photos, is that it separates the citizen from the scientist: the citizen just has to share the photo. That’s dropped the barrier to entry for citizen science.”

Redwoods: There's an app for that. (Photo: Michael Limm)

We’re not the only ones who think iNaturalist is pretty cool. Save the Redwoods does, too.

The San Francisco-based conservation organization has teamed up with the biodiversity-tracking social networking site to create an iPhone app exclusively for monitoring redwood and giant sequoia forests. It’s called Redwood Watch. It uses the same technology as the iNaturalist iPhone app, aggregating data on a special Redwoods page within iNaturalist.org.

“We hope that this will help us have a better idea of where redwoods are, and then we can use that data to understand what kinds of conditions they can tolerate,” said Emily Limm, director of science and planning for Save the Redwoods.

Like the iNaturalist iPhone app, Redwood Watch is a free download that allows users to take field observations and easily upload them to a central online database.  There’s an online tutorial explaining how it works.

Limm said the hope is that members of the public will download the app onto their iPhones, and use it when they’re out hiking and spot redwoods, sequoias, and a list of other forest organisms the organization is hoping to track. These field observations from “citizen scientists” will help researchers gain a clearer picture of where the trees actually are throughout California.

“It’s impossible for us to collect all this data ourselves,” said Limm. “If people are engaged, they can help us refine our understanding of where the trees are in their natural ranges and where those edges are.”

But the project isn’t limited to trees in their native California habitats. Limm says that data about redwoods from botanical gardens and forestry projects around the world is just as important because it can yield clues about the range of environments the trees can tolerate. That could help scientists understand how the species may be affected by climate change, which can help land managers and conservation organizations plan for the future.

There’s more about the project, and about California’s redwoods, from Paul Rogers at Mercury News. And see KQED’s QUEST for more about redwoods and climate change.

(Photo: Richard Morgenstein)

Last month I went out to Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve near Stanford, where Scott Loarie and Ken-ichi Ueda showed me and about a dozen docents how to use the new iNaturalist iPhone app, which Ueda created. The aim of the app is to make recording and sharing of accurate field observations incredibly simple. It’s still in testing mode and not yet available to the public. “Citizen scientists” can already upload their digital photos and share them with an online community of naturalists around the world, at the iNaturalist website.

This week I spoke with Healy Hamilton, who directs the Center for Applied Biodiversity Informatics at the California Academy of Sciences. Below are some excerpts from our interview about climate change, citizen science, and iNaturalist:

Q: What’s the potential of citizen science?
A: The world is changing faster than ever before in the history of all human  civilization. There’s no way that scientists can monitor those changes. It’s critical for us to understand the pace of change, and where change is taking place the most.

With global change, there’s a fundamental rearrangement of where species live.  We already know almost everywhere we look that species are on the move trying to track their preferred climate envelopes. To understand the implications of this kind of shifting, we need to have people help us monitor these changes, both the rate of the change and the locations of the changes. This is where there’s a profound role for citizen science.

Q: How can a tool like iNaturalist help scientists study climate change?
A:…Citizen science can help us understand how climate change is unfolding in situ. Every species has edges to their range, so there’s sort of a central range, a northern leading edge, a southern edge, eastern and western edges.  Citizens can help us monitor how climate change is impacting the edges of those ranges, which is where climate impacts are most likely to occur.

For example, some of the easternmost redwood forests are likely to experience the highest summer temperatures [in the redwoods' range], and summer temps seem to be changing quite rapidly, maybe more than temps at other times of the year.  So if citizens can help us say, ‘Look, I just saw a grove of redwood trees and the leaves are brown and this is where it’s located,’ we can actually map climate in that area and see how climate change is unfolding on the landscape.  There’s no way scientists can be everywhere at once to understand how these changes are unfolding, but citizens are hiking through redwood forests all the time.

…So applications such as iNaturalist are going to increase the biodiversity data that scientists have to work with. Not all observations are going to be useful, but many of them will be useful to us. Because of our need for verified observations about what occurs where and when on the planet, as scientists, we think citizen science has a huge role to play in improving our models about forecasting future climate change impacts to species and ecosystems.

Q: Why do we need to study these changes?  What’s the big picture?
A: Climate change is the single most important threat that’s facing all of human society.  If we continue to emit the current rates of greenhouse gases into the future, and if we do end up with 900 or 1,000 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere at the end of the century, we will be living on a fundamentally different planet, and that transition is not going to be comfortable for us.  All of our society, all of our infrastructure, all of our food resources, our forest resources, the things that we need, the things we’ve evolved our society around consuming, they like the climate the way it was, [at] about 150-300 parts per million of CO2.  So it’s important to understand how climate change is going to influence biodiversity, the biodiversity we depend on, every bite of food we eat, the clothes on our back, all of our paper and forest products. It influences how diseases are transmitted and all kinds of public health, food security, and national security issues.

In this short video, Scott Loarie and Ken-ichi Ueda explain how the iNaturalist iPhone app works.

Ken-ichi Ueda and Scott Loarie demonstrated the new iNaturalist iPhone app at Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve (Photo: Richard Morgenstein)

At Jasper Ridge, a biological preserve and study area on the Stanford campus, a dozen of the preserve’s docents gathered this week to learn about a new iPhone application that could ultimately help scientists study how ecosystems are adapting to climate change.

The new app, called iNaturalist, is the mobile version of a citizen-science website by the same name.  The iPhone app is still in testing and not yet available, but the website, iNaturalist.org, is already an active online community of citizen-scientists around the world who use the site to record and share their sightings.

One of the original iNaturalist creators, Ken-ichi Ueda, has teamed up with Scott Loarie, a post-doctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institute at Stanford. The two are hoping to leverage the site and the mobile application to engage more citizens to contribute to a growing database of field observations that could help scientists track biodiversity.

“One of things that’s most pressing in conservation is that species are going extinct about a thousand times faster than they ever have before,” said Loarie.  “So the scale of this problem is just incredible. It’s way too difficult for a handful of museums and graduate students to stay on top of.”

With the iNaturalist site, and especially with the new iPhone app, which streamlines the uploading process, Loarie hopes to get as many “eyes on the ground” as possible, documenting where species are, and where they aren’t.

“You can think about species around the world like little lights blinking on and off,” Loarie explained. “Whats happening with climate change and land use change is that those lights are blinking off faster than they are blinking on, and a lot of them are happening totally under the radar screen.”

Ueda originally co-developed the iNaturalist site as a project during his Masters studies at UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

“My initial goal with the site was to get people engaged with nature, not necessarily to do the science,” said Ueda. “The scientific data is a really valuable and useful by-product, but my primary motivation is to get people outside and thinking about the plants and animals that they’re seeing.”

But now Ueda and Loarie are trying to take iNaturalist to the next level by finding ways this crowd-sourced data can be useful to scientists.

“It’s really cool if I’m walking around and I see a horned lizard because they are really cool animals,” said Ueda. “But it’s even cooler if I see one here at Jasper Ridge, because no one has seen one here for a long time, and it could be locally extinct.”

An observation like that, he said, could be valuable to scientists. One of the tasks now, he said, is to find ways to connect that data with the scientists who care about it and to establish standards of data quality so that scientists can trust it.

Ueda said the iPhone app may not be ready for the public for another month, but in the meantime, users can easily upload their digital photos from the field to the site, once they get home.   The site is connected with Google Maps, and Wikipedia and the photo-sharing site Flickr, so adding comments, information, and geographical information is easy.  The app, when it’s ready, should make logging observations even easier.

In the field on Friday, Loarie and Ueda were showing off a testing version of the app.

“I think the idea has a a lot of merit,” said Ross Bright, a docent at Jasper Ridge who was at the presentation. “Whether its workable and doable is the problem.  My own personal perspective is that most docents are not necessarily literate in the high-tech gadgetry that’s involved in the this.  There will be a learning curve.”

Ueda and Loarie hope that not only will the docents at Jasper Ridge start cataloging their observations with the new app, but also that the public at large will catch on and record their observations wherever they are.

“There are no geographic or taxonomic restrictions on the site,” said Ueda. “You don’t even really have to know what you’re looking at. You can be like, “Oh, sweet, a tree. There are trees in my yard,”  That’s good to think about.  Anyone can do it.”