First Day at iNaturalist
I was reading a backlogged issue of the HerpDigest listserv and saw this website mentioned in passing; next thing I knew I'd spent over 3 hours here! What a great idea! Of course now I have a daunting task ahead of me, as I have years of pictures as well as several random bird lists that could potentially be added. I've started the process with some of the first observations that popped into my head, but I'm really not sure how comprehensively I'll decide to go. And then there's the multitude of memorable sightings that I never "recorded" (either in a notebook or by snapping a photo). I don't even want to imagine all of the time that would take!
As much as I'd like a complete "life list" to satisfy the oddly organizational corner of my mind, I think that it will probably be unrealistic. So I'll probably try to dig up details about herps first, because I've joined by the reptile and the amphibian BioBlitz projects. I hope that these data prove useful somewhere down the line, because I think that a collection of observations from naturalists (both amateur and professional) has incredible potential. After all, we as individuals may take for granted that a specific area where we regularly explore tends to have healthy populations of a given species, but nobody else will know unless someone records it! I can see this being especially valuable for rare or secretive species that are difficult to find even if you're looking for them; after all, with all of the human eyes out there it's pretty likely that somebody is going to find something cool just by random chance.
