Personal Project
Personal Project, iNaturlist
Each student will be responsible for registering for an iNaturalist account (http://www.inaturalist.org/) and adding at least one observation per week. You should clearly understand the ultimate purpose of the project and be able to verbalize it:
You are collecting research-grade observations used by real scientists. Let’s have the scientific community be proud of us! We are doing something very important, and the community is watching us.
Your observations are YOUR observations. If you are sharing a camera with a group member, you can agree as to who uses which photo(s). You are NOT allowed to download photos from the internet, that is illegal. You must use your own photos. Not only will you get an F on the project, but you could be prosecuted or fined for copyright infringement.
No photos/observations of humans, pets or domestic animals are allowed, or you could be removed from the project. Avoid domestic plants (e.g., house plants, ornamental plants, etc.). The goal is to get native plants and animals if possible. You will need to get your observations from “natural” areas such as local, state or county parks such as Willowbrook Park, Silver Lake Park, Clove Lakes Park, Wolfe’s Pond Park, High Rock Park, Great Kills Park, etc.
Each observation must have a specific location (using the GPS in a smartphone or manual Google pin drop). You must attempt to ID to the closest taxon level that you can. You must revisit your observations regularly (e.g., read and respond to comments, agree, or disagree to IDs, check group members IDs).
You MUST incorporate your observations into our project to receive credit!!
Each observation must have at least THREE photographs (e.g., if your observation is a tree, take a close-up photo of a leaf, one of a branch, and one of the whole tree, etc.). Scale is also very important. Finally, with detailed photographs and at least a few sentences (e.g., physical description, behavior), you are more likely to get your observation identified to species level or finer (i.e., subspecies). There ARE ways to include multiple photos using a digital camera or using the smartphone application!!
