Discovering iNaturalist

I recently learned about a City Nature Challenge from a poster stuck up on a window at my local shops. 

The challenge involves photographing any plants, insects, animals, reptiles, fish, fungi over a four or five+day period. You then upload your photo and observations (what, where etc) to Nat Geo's iNaturalist website (www.inaturalist.org). 

This platform exists all the time, not just these few days, and it is global. 

Time-limited challenges are created to get people out to take photos and record observations. For this local, time-limited challenge, observations can be tagged to this specific Garden Route project.

I had not looked at the site until last night. There I discovered an incredible world. I've been looking for interesting things instead of everything-things and on this site everything counts.

I did submit two observations last night - a beautiful mountain tortoise that I saw yesterday afternoon and also a striking pocket of furry, orange Common Lionspaw (Leonotis leonurus) flowers in an area with more black wattle and bracken than anything else.

I had planned to put in some time on the trails this afternoon, now that I understand better how this all works, but ended up leaving for Swellendam for an early morning meeting. While I will miss out on contributing more sightings and identifications to this specific challenge, I can add my contributions throughout the year.

This platform is a phenomenal database for studying distribution, variations, numbers and diversity - all made possible by citizen scientist contributions. 

Amazing.