Great new Wildlife Observation site

[gdurkee]

A couple of grad students at UCB School of Information have, as a Master's project, started a web site to map & report any natural history observation anywhere in the world. It looks to be a very cool site. It's just coming out of beta and getting ready for prime time.

http://inaturalist.org/

The site allows you to fill in a form about the critter or plant you saw; locate it precisely on a zoomable map interface; attach a photo linked to Flikr if you want; then record it to their database.

http://inaturalist.org/observations/68

It looks to be pretty neat way to get people involved in recording their natural history observations, make them available to others and start a centralized publicly available database. They also have a check box if you don't know the species or aren't sure. It's then put on a discussion page for others to identify.

They're still tweaking it and hope to have the capability to batch process observations in the future (e.g. dump a bunch of already geolocated stuff into their database from, say, a hiking group), as well as a number of other improvements. They're also very open to suggestions. You can send them thoughts through their Google Groups site:

http://groups.google.com/group/inaturalist.

They have an immediate goal of 1,000 observations to work the kinks out. So log in and give them a few sightings!

Anyway, hope some of you find this useful. Many thanks!

George