iNaturalist is a Citizen Science platform to record sightings of flora and fauna - anything from an amoeba to a whale - to build a biodiversity database for use by the research community. For the past decade I have been photographing at New Ferry Butterfly Park and over the past five years I have been converting the images into wildlife observations. Initially I used the iRecord platform but now I almost exclusively use iNaturalist. I am not alone. There are currently over 2000 observations of nearly 500 species from the Butterfly Park on iNaturalist posted by 54 observers, which may be seen at:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/new-ferry-butterfly-park-howell-road-new-ferry-bebington-wirral-uk
An increasing number of people are taking photographs of the wildlife at the butterfly park, and it would be great to see the resulting images developed into wildlife observations. To facilitate this, I’ll now describe how I convert my photographs into iNaturalist observations.
After a photo session, I download the image files from the camera onto a computer and go through them deleting anything substandard. The remainder, usually about a third, are processed using Photoshop. Conversion to observations requires logging into the iNaturalist website (https://www.inaturalist.org) which opens at the ‘Dashboard’ page.
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| The dashboard page on the iNaturalist website |
Pressing the ‘Upload’ tab on the top right of the page opens the ‘Drag & drop some photos or sounds’ page onto which one or more image files for each observation may be copied. If there are multiple images for an observation they may be merged by dragging them onto the master image.
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| Drag & drop some photos or sounds |
The next job is to populate the ‘Species Name’ and ‘Location’ fields for each observation, adding any plaintext you wish to the ‘Notes’ fields. Clicking in the ‘Species Name’ box offers a range of possible names using iNaturalist’s AI-based analysis of the image. If you see the correct name then select it. Otherwise, choose the suggestion at the top of the list (probably a genus) to provide a starting point. If your camera has GPS then the ‘Location’ field may have been automatically populated from the EXIF data. If not, click inside the box to open an interactive map window.
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| Select the location of your observation using the interactive map |
I usually enter ‘New Ferry Butterfly Park’ into the ‘Search Location’ field which zooms the map into the area of interest. Click the map where you took your photo and make the resulting circle larger or smaller to set the spatial accuracy. By default, the Geoprivacy is set to ‘Open’. Please don’t change this or your observation will be useless to science. I also standardise the ‘Locality notes’ field to ‘New Ferry Butterfly Park’ to make it easier to discover observations from the reserve. Press ‘Update Observations’ when all the required information has been entered.
Once all the observations have had their names and locations populated the ‘Submit observations’ button is pressed to upload and publish them. This opens an ‘Edit Observations’ Page, which may be used to document the observations with annotations.
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| The Edit Observations Page on iNaturalist |
Whilst this is optional it increases the scientific value of the records. For example, it provides a mechanism for researchers interested in butterflies from getting caterpillar observations. Clicking on an observation species name, such as ‘Common Crimson-and-gold Moth’, opens that observation in edit mode.
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| A view of the page for one of Roy's observations |
I usually populate the ‘Alive or Dead’, ‘Life Stage’, and (if I know it) ‘Sex’ attributes. The ‘Life Stage’ attribute is particularly important for insects as it allows separation of larvae observations from adult observations. Once populated (there’s no save to be pressed) the next observation can be selected using the green circular arrow symbols or the ‘Dashboard’ can be reached using the circular button to the right of ‘Upload’.
A published observation will be viewed by many ‘iNatters’, some of whom join the community identification process by commenting on, changing or refining the ID field. This process usually works very well with prompt, constructive input from experienced identifiers significantly enhancing the observations. Sometimes, nothing happens because there are no experienced identifiers for the species observed and occasionally, things can go awry when people identify beyond their competence and get it wrong. In my experience other members of the community help when this happens. Once two members of the community have confirmed the identification the observation is elevated to ‘Research Grade’ and made available to researchers.
This blog post describes the way that I work and is intended to provide an initial pathway for camera - as opposed to phone - users who wish to start wildlife recording using iNaturalist. It is not intended to be a users’ manual. There are many features that I haven’t mentioned and no doubt many other ways to do what I do that others may prefer once they get to know the package. For phone camera users iNaturalist provides an App but I can’t help with this as I have never used it. The Cheshire Local Environmental Record Centre, Record LRC, run field days giving practical training using the App. These are usually in the weeks before the City Nature Challenge bioblitz in April or May and are advertised on the Record web site.
Roy Lowry
.jpg "A reminder of the old gates at the Butterfly Park. Quite the transformation!")
.jpg "The Lord Lieutenant of Merseyside making a bicycle-powered smoothie")
