Overall Experience Essay
In the past few weeks, I have been involved with the Citizen Science Program using the iNaturalist App, following the challenges posted by New York Botanical Garden's Ecoquest. My experience included downloading the app, making photograph observations and writing journal entries about them. I got to watch as they received research grades, and how some of the observation classifications changed as more people commented and suggested different IDs.
The Citizen Science program was definitely rewarding and fun. With the global pandemic on my mind, I find that I spend a majority of my time indoors, and it's rare that I go out and interact with nature. In addition to the pandemic, I also live in New York City, where concrete is the majority of my experience, and it's hard to find places to hike, or really have any "fresh" air. There are a few select parks near me, such as Central Park and Riverside Park, but those parks do not compare to the great preserves in the rest of the country. With the idea that New York City is such an urban landscape, I certainly did not expect to find much, if anything, in the parks around me when it came to the Ecoquest challenge. I thought that New York only had trees and some shrubs, and pigeons. But this challenge changed my perspective a lot.
I was feeling worried that I would not find any of the plants that were listed on the challenge. I didn't realize how many different types of species of plants lived in Central Park, it's like a tiny forest! It was so remarkable that after I found the American Jumpseed, we saw a hawk! A real, Red-Tailed Hawk. I felt like I was in the middle of the woods. There were a lot of people gathered around watching the hawk in awe and taking pictures. In addition to the hawk, American Jumpseed, Groundsel Tree, and Common Mugwort, I also saw Blue Jays and Cardinals! I didn't post those birds on iNaturalist, however, seeing so many different species in Central Park was so exciting. It gave me a new appreciation for the world around me.
The downsides to this challenge, in my opinion, was that we did not have much context to the plants we had to find. Besides my google search, I felt that the New York Botanical Garden could have gone into more detail about the species of plants that I was looking for. While it was super exciting to actually find the plants, I wish I had known more about them to make the experience even more meaningful.
I really appreciated that other people could find my observation and either agree with me or suggest an ID. I think that this process really encourages learning, and it creates a very inclusive and collaborative virtual environment. I like that I am able to make observations just like a professional scientist can, and both of our observations will be posted. It's so exciting to see if people agree or not with my observations, and then finally getting a research grade is so cool.
The Ecoquest challenges, and the concept of the iNaturalist app is a fantastic way to interact with your environment, and also learn about wildlife near you in a super accessible way. Anyone can do the challenges, and it doesn't matter where you are. You can even be in the center of a huge city where you think there wouldn't be any natural life (~NYC) ! Even if you don't feel like posting your observations, you can still read about the plant life around you just by simply logging onto the app.
I think that I could have made more observations in addition to the ones I did. I made a few observations in Central Park, and many more in Grant Park on Long Island, but I could have done more. I could have read more about the species of plants I was identifying before I found them, and learned a bit more about their histories. I think that would have made the experience even more meaningful and memorable for me.
If I were to do the Citizen Science Program again, I would definitely read more about the species of plants I was going to find before I found them. I think context is very important, and learning the facts of the plants would have been cool, because then I could have made even more observations about them. In the future, I'd read more, post more observations, and certainly look more into the observations already made near me! I love reading about the natural environment around me, and iNaturalist gave me a platform to do that.
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