Every Observation Counts
Environmental education increases awareness of environmental issues, fosters stewardship, and provides the opportunities for people to develop skills to take responsible action. By recording and sharing your observations of living species, you are joining and supporting a community of millions of scientists and naturalists working to understand and protect nature. By joining NEEF’s National Public Lands Day BioBlitz, you will help others learn about biodiversity, species occurrence, and species identification.
Did you know that more than a third of the United States are public lands, areas of land and water that are owned by the American people and managed on our behalf by government agencies? By recording your observations of biodiversity on public lands during National Public Lands Day, you will help celebrate the unique biodiversity near you, call attention to invasive species that may be threatening ecosystem function and educate our community. Crowdsourced data in iNaturalist can be used by researchers for their biodiversity studies and by the public who want to use the data to explore questions of their own. All you need to do is post what you observed with a date, evidence of your observation such as a photo or audio recording if you have it, and any other details you can share such as the location of your observation and the species if you are able to identify what you saw. If you can’t identify what you observed, the iNaturalist community of naturalists will suggest species identification or you could try and suggest an organism ID using a guidebook or a tool like the Seek app. Your data can help contribute to citizen science projects now and in the future! We are excited to see everyone’s observations starting on September 9th through October 7th, let us know what you saw by joining our NPLD BioBlitz.
