by Sarah Walkley
Trailside Nature Museum staff have been cataloging the biodiversity of Ward Pound Ridge Reservation’s
4,300 acres for decades. More recently, we have begun doing so through an online project on the electronic platform iNaturalist to allow county staff as well as visitors to easily and accurately document plants and animals in the park and surrounding land. The shared project, called the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation Biodiversity Club, can be accessed via the iNaturalist website or the free phone app.
iNaturalist is a platform that allows anyone to learn about and record plants and animals they observe by posting an observation. Observations are the basic unit of iNaturalist, and typically include a picture, location, and date/time. Using just a photo, the app will suggest the genus and species of the organism. I am almost always surprised how accurate the algorithm is. One of my favorite iNaturalist activities is opening up the app anywhere I am in the world, and clicking “explore”. Nearby observations will appear. Seeing the many observations, I feel more connected to both the local community and to the wildlife there. These observations are also important as they can help steer research projects and land management practices. If you choose to post one of your observations, other naturalists will have the opportunity to help you identify the species, and can agree or disagree with the original ID. Before an agreement is reached, observations are labeled casual. After at least two of three identifiers agree, observations then become research grade. While not a perfect method, this distinction allows users to quickly have a high level of confidence in an observation.
To date, the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation Biodiversity Club has 935 casual observations across 595 species! Of the nearly 600 species observed, 384 fall under the research grade category. The 384 research grade species in the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation Biodiversity Club consist of 177 insects, 126 plants, 30 fungi, 13 birds, 12 arachnids, 10 mammals, 6 reptiles, and 6 amphibians. Taking a closer look, the most common observations in each of these categories respectively are the monarch, mile-a-minute vine, turkey tail and violet toothed polypore fungi, northern cardinal, yellow garden spider and brilliant jumping spider, white-tailed deer, northern water snake & eastern copperhead, and American toad. Surprisingly, no fish observations have been observed.
If you are one of the contributors, thank you! Your observations are seen and appreciated by park visitors
and Trailside staff. If you haven’t contributed yet, consider making an account at www.iNaturalist.com or on the iNaturalist App. The park has had a tremendous increase in visitors over the last two months—we encourage you all to take a few moments and post photographs of our park’s plants and animals for current and future generations to explore!