Ecologist Kiran Lee reflects on a year of wildlife recording at OmVed Gardens.
Identifying species encourages a connectedness with our natural environments. It helps understand where a species evolved from, how it lives, and its relationships with other species: what it needs from the world and how others need it.
Every summer, it is a joy to look to the skies and identify swifts. These birds whiz round, gleaning insects on the wing. To see one in the UK is to see a survivor that has just made epic 10,000km journeys from Africa to return to breeding grounds. It brings an immense feeling of connectedness knowing the insects here provide for swifts residing in Africa and in turn, birds of prey higher up the food chain. On top of that, nesting swifts are very faithful to breeding sites and so this connection can feel quite personal. The swift you are observing leave a nest box may have been one you have been seeing every year for many years (a common swift can live as long as 17 years).
"Every summer, it is a joy to look to the skies and identify swifts. These birds whiz round, gleaning insects on the wing. To see one in the UK is to see a survivor that has just made epic 10,000km journeys from Africa to return to breeding grounds."
Urban green spaces such as parks and gardens offer huge potential as localised, accessible spaces where we might explore our local nature. We have been inviting the public to attend “BioBlitz” events: timed sessions sharing how to use the app “iNaturalist” on phones to identify and record observations within the space of Omved Gardens.
Free phone apps that help identify and record wildlife such as iNaturalist have great value to bring a sense of connectedness that is so important for conservation. They are fun to use and encourage your curiosity for the natural world. Before, identifying an organism might have required carrying a bulky field guide, and good foundational knowledge. Now identification is made possible with the aid of artificial intelligence in free phone apps such as iNaturalist (photographic identification of organisms) or Merlin (live sound identification of birds). In the case of iNaturalist, you are required to upload a photo that is tagged with a timestamp and location. There is then the exciting option to use iNaturalist’s pattern-recognition feature to work out what organism it is you have photographed. This feature scans your image(s) for patterns, referencing it to other identified submissions, incorporating the time and location of your photograph and then outputs a probabilistic list of organisms which it thinks is in the image and that you can select. Submitted observations are made freely available and other users can agree or suggest better identifications for your photograph, perhaps leaving comments. There are many drawbacks to this. The pattern-recognition software that makes it so great, also can lead to spurious identifications. A photo of a willow leaf for example, can be recognised as the eggs of a type of wasp that uses willow leaves exclusively to lay eggs in: a willow sawfly gall. Photographs can be limiting in taking organisms to species level, particularly for some insects that require microscopy to sort from related, superficially similar looking species. But, with some care and personal homework, it can be fun using iNaturalist to guide you into what kind of organism you are observing.
With help from three BioBlitz sessions, we have uploaded 767 observations, recording 294 species, from 40 users at OmVed Gardens.
Unsurprisingly, plants make up the majority of observations (58%), followed by animals (30%) mushrooms (8%).
To use iNaturalist is to be quite self-motivated, and anecdotally, I have seen users explore at their own pace the organisms that interest them most.
Here are a couple observations at OmVed Gardens that I think are worth pointing out.
An ambush predator that can control pigment production to match the colour of the flower it has chosen to hide in and snatch visiting pollinators from: the goldenrod crab spider.
A little-known and glaringly large, orange beetle with long antennae that usually resides along Britain’s Southern coast feeding on our wild carrot: the tawny longhorn beetle.
Good photos combined with location and date information help verify observations for use in research, with iNaturalist being cited over 4000 times in scientific articles.
Overall, these BioBlitz’s have been really fun, exploratory events that allow people to learn whilst contributing to citizen science. We think there is great value to using phone apps such as iNaturalist to enjoy identifying, recording and connecting with their local nature.
Written by Kiran Lee.
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