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.

Scott Loarie demonstrates the iNaturalist iPhone app to docents at Jasper Ridge. (Photo: Richard Morgenstein)

The new iPhone app for the online community iNaturalist is officially out and available for free download from Apple’s App Store.  Its creator, Ken-ichi Ueda, hopes that the new app will make sharing and uploading field observations so easy, that more people will want to document what they find next time they’re out on a hike.

“My primary motivation is to get people outside, thinking about the plants and animals they are seeing and actually recording them,” he said.  “The act of recording really locks it in your mind.”

But as I explain today in my radio piece on The California Report, Ueda and his partner Scott Loarie, a post-doctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution, want to do more than just get people out in nature.  They also are hoping that with the technology of iNaturalist, citizen scientists will collect and aggregate on-the-ground data that can be useful for scientists studying climate change.

“What we really want to do is to use a common social framework to connect local experts familiar with the biodiversity of a certain area to scientists who can make that data useful,” said Loarie.

For a quick how-to-lesson on using the app, check out this video:

While social networking and mobile technology may be fairly new, the basic idea of getting volunteers to help scientists document nature is not.   In 1997, I volunteered on several occasions for NOAA’s SEALS program.  We’d head out to Bolinas Lagoon in groups of three or four to stand by the side of Highway 1 for hours at a time counting seals.  (We didn’t have iPhones then; just pencils, paper, and clipboards.)   Then there’s the Audubon Society’s Christmas Day Bird Count, which just celebrated it’s 111th anniversary. More than  60,000 people across the county spend the holiday counting birds as part of that project.

There’s also the California Roadkill Observation System, a project of UC Davis that asks volunteers to report roadkill sitings. Organizers hope to use the data to identify and predict “roadkill hot-spots.”

There are actually dozens (at least) of ways to get involved with citizen science efforts around the state.  And if animals (and roadkill) aren’t your thing, there are efforts like Mushroom Observer. Project Budburst, and the Great Sunflower Project. Many more are listed on the Science for Citizens website, which lets you search projects by topic, location, and difficulty.

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.”