Fish Like a GIRL

Regular readers have probably heard me talk about iNaturalist before. I would venture to guess that many also have the app on their smartphone, even if just for the fun of it. I have to admit that I do not use it as much as I should. I will try to make a more concerted effort this year, because it really is interesting to look back at everything a person has seen over the course of the year. The cool thing about iNaturalist is that you can track all of the plant species and animal species that you find and wish to record, all in one app.

The Wisconsin Mussel Monitoring Program and the Wisconsin Rare Plant Monitoring Program also utilize this app, as well as many other bioblitzes and other programs in which users may be involved, or can get involved through the app. Users can even create their own bioblitz, where other users are invited to find as many species as possible in a given area and/or in a given time frame.

For those who do not know, the iNaturalist app an app that can also be used on a desktop. It allows users to track the species they see, upload photographs, and talk with other users regarding what species they may have seen of whose identity they were not sure. Several times I have had my identifications confirmed, and other times, people have offered suggestions, based on a photograph I have uploaded. 

To me, what makes this app unique is that everyone can look at other users observations and offer suggestions as to what a species it might be, and to talk a bit about the whys and the wheres of the species. 

I suppose it is kind of like social media for plant and animal geeks like me. 

Another one of the things that is fun about this app is that often we perceive that we are a lone person in an area with an interest in: bees, dicots, invertebrates — fill in any plant or animal affinity here — but with iNaturalist, I am able to look around my area and see the observations of other people. There is a map included in the app. In certain places, the map literally lights up with observations people have entered into it. 

“How cool,” I always think when I see others have put in their own observations. Each time I go to the app I realize there were several cool things I should have put in, such as my hummingbird moth sighting that I was freaking out about one evening when I went to close the drapes of my large picture window in the front of the house. If the neighbors happened to be watching, I cannot imagine what they were thinking about the crazy lady that moved into the house last year pointing and jumping up and down about something in her front garden.

I also realize that there are many more species, especially of plants, that I should be entering into the app. It could become a full-time passion, I can imagine. 

I recently attended an iNaturalist webinar dedicated to plants and phenology. That was one of the reasons I decided to make a concerted effort to use the app more this year. According to the webinar, almost three million people have already added plant observations to iNaturalist so far. There really is power in these apps that create these large, global databases. 

First, I should probably back up and talk about phenology a bit, for those who have not heard the term. Phenology is really just the timing of seasonal changes in plants an animals. Some of the big ones with which many may be concerned are things like bird migration, the timing of fall leaves, the timing of walleye spawn, etc. There are many efforts going on right now to see how the timing of some of these biological events might be changing over time in the face of changing climate conditions. 

Pollination and pollinators are a good example. 

As certain pollinators emerge, their host plant species have evolved over time to be emerging or blooming at the same time. In a perfect world, this happens simultaneously, and the pollinators get the food they need while the plants benefits from the insect’s pollinator services. Everything works as planned.

But when we look at the way the world is changing, with climate predictions being what they are, there is a question as to whether or not this phenology will always line up or if there will be some sort of “phenological whiplash” that might occur if one species in an interaction adapts to changes faster than its food, for instance. With the literally millions of interactions between species in the world, and even just here in the Northwoods, understanding all of those relationships is a heavy lift at best. Looking just at phenology of plant/pollinator relationships, if a plant shifts its growing season to earlier in the year, for instance, and its flowering window is now earlier in the year before the pollinator is active, this causes a mismatch. The plant does not reproduce because pollen is not being transported, and when the pollinators do emerge, they do not have the needed food resources available, likely leading to some mortality issues in those species as well. These mismatches can have big ecosystem repercussions.

Phenobase, a Natural Science Foundation-funded initiative, is a program that is looking to take data from all of the places it exists: community science programs, historical collections and monitoring programs, for example, and put all of that data into a usable, searchable database where users could go to view historical phenological data and how things may have changed over the years. 

Machine learning models have been trained to look at the images and classify the phenology changes in the images in the database.  iNaturalists are being used to train those machine learning models, which have been input by iNaturalist users. Each time a phenology annotation is put into the program, it can be used to help train those models. 

The webinar showed an almost global view of phenological shifts, which was really interesting to see. There is something about knowing the observations that I take and enter into an app, such as iNaturalist, will be used on such a large scale. The thing with these apps and these huge databases is that there would truly be no other way for researchers to collect all of that data themselves. Citizen science is a huge contributor to many areas of natural science. Everyone from the young child making observations in their own backyard to the true outdoor adventurist making plant and animal observations on a back country hiking trip to the top of a remote mountain is able to add important information to the same database. 

One interesting concept discussed in the webinar was extrapolating observations out to other years and other conditions. For instance, one of the presenters talked about how observations from iNaturalist were used to predict what might have happened in other years. His research was on Joshua trees, but obviously it could be used for many other species. With enough data from observations to understand when Joshua trees were flowering, researchers could look back to when those conditions were present in the past and find likely times when the trees would have ben flowering previously. 

Two of the researchers on the webinar were from southern California, so of course the conversation also turned to fire and recovery from fire, which was another great discussion. Fire is often used as a management technique. In many cases, it can also help to prevent the spreading of forest fires once they start. But in all cases, managed fire is used to either favor certain species or to deter certain species, depending on management needs. In these cases, observations from databases such as iNaturalist can be used to gain a better understanding of what plant species were recolonizing an area, and the same can be said of recolonization after a wild or forest fire.

The webinar pointed out that there were 94 million observations of flowering plants, and only 10% had annotations about flowers or fruits. When it came to vascular plants, there were 99.6 million observations, but only a tiny fraction had annotations about leaves. 

Dr. Carri Seltzer said there are over 1,000 years of records of cherry trees blooming in Japan. Cherries, and several other species of foods we consume, are in the Genus Prunus, and she spoke about different phenological stages of these plants. Those stages include the plant having no flowers or fruits, flowering buds, actual full flowers, and fruits or seeds. All of these stages are important to determine if the phenology is changing over time.

Beckie Gaskill may be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].