Diario de calloftheloon

Hello iNaturalist enthusiasts!

I want to introduce as many of you as I can to Rate My Land (RML). I think you will like it.

First a little background and at the end I am going to ask for some help.

As many of you know, the first step to conserving rare (and common!) species is having a thorough understanding of a species’ distribution and status. We can’t protect that which we don’t know to exist, or at least we can’t evaluate our efforts to protect species if we don’t track biodiversity. The iNaturalist community is leading the way in helping conservationists fill in the knowledge gaps.

A couple years before I heard of iNaturalist (2012-ish), I started working up the idea for Rate My Land, which developed after reading about the difficulties of conservation on private lands. Most of my country (U.S.A.) is privately owned (60%). In many places in the eastern U.S., the percentage is close to 90% private ownership.

Working on Rate My Land as a side job (hobby really), I was able to launch RML last year. Rate My Land is a networking website that encourages private landowners to discover the living creatures (biodiversity) on their property and actively conserve their land by 1) connecting them with biological consultants, 2) providing education on biodiversity and land management, and 3) inspiring and engaging landowners through a social media platform that allows them to interact with other landowners and see how their property “ranks”.

So I think Rate My Land has a role to play in its piece of the conservation puzzle—reaching, encouraging, and empowering private landowners. It's services run parallel with iNaturalists, but I would like RML to expand and grow. I would like to bring the power of iNaturalist to Rate My Land. Rate My Land can help increase the reach of iNaturalist while iNaturalist will provide RML with new tools to reach a wider audience.

HERE IS WHERE I NEED YOUR HELP. I am seeking to raise the funding needed to pay a programmer to incorporate iNat into RML so RML users will be able to tag observations taken from their property and have the observations appear in their land’s profile page on RML. As observations are added to their land’s profile (“project”), a score is generated. You can probably imagine how generating a score would be appealing. My hope is that in addition to bringing more people to RML and increasing iNat observations it will also increase the number of landowners seeking out RML consultants to complete the RML biodiversity surveys or some other service.

I need 150 of you to each pitch in $10 for this to happen. That’s 0.1% of the 151,000+ people signed up on iNat. That’s 5% of the 3027 curators. That’s 51% of the 297 users who have logged over 1,000 observations.

Here is the link to the campaign: http://bit.ly/1Pbsi5h

For the many who reside outside of the U.S., I have only been able to focus on the U.S., but I think RML can play a role elsewhere too. The more money I can raise above and beyond my goal, the more I can do to expand RML’s reach (Tag me and let me know how it would work in your country).

Thank you @bouteloua @loarie @rcurtis @charlie @northeastnaturalist @denniswross @kueda @carrieseltzer for the support you have shown!

@maractwin @tortuga_rapido @hawnzd @elfaulkner @aguilita @calopteryx @botanygirl @molanic @sanguinaria33 @sambiology @swampy @glmory @kestrel @leannewallisbiologist can you help me spread the word and invite others in the community to support this project? Invite them to follow Rate My Land on FB or Twitter?

I am also looking to add more consultants to the RML consultant list, especially looking for biologists specializing in invertebrates @lepalot @scottking @jimjohnson http://www.ratemyland.com/consultants

I would be more than happy to explain RML in more detail, feel free to contact me with any questions or suggestions. Thank you very much!

~Derek
www.RateMyLand.com
ratemyland (at) gmail
http://bit.ly/1Pbsi5h