The internet and digital photography have opened up wonderful opportunities for ordinary people to get involved in citizen science as observers of the natural world. Online meeting places and forums come and go but the best at the moment seems to be iNaturalist – https://www.inaturalist.org.
It’s a global project and the numbers are huge: 54 million observations by 1.4 million observers from nearly every country in the world when I looked recently. That presents a management problem, of course, which is solved by having countries run independent branches, e.g. https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/
Anyone at all can browse the content of the site but people have to sign up to participate. When that’s done (at no cost and very little trouble) they can upload their observations, help with identifying others’ observations, and join the discussion forums.
It’s a big and complex site but not too difficult to negotiate because it is exceptionally well planned and because there is no need to use most of its functions until you want to. (I have to admit there are some that I haven’t bothered with in the year I have been a member.)
And ordinary people can make very useful contributions to the project, especially if they (we) are outside the big cities.
It’s obvious, looking at a map of Australian observations of butterflies and moths, that any life outside the big population centres is under-represented. Zoom in on North Queensland and the pattern is even clearer – and it’s the same for birds, and will be the same for all other life forms.
This means that if you visit Mount Fox, Undara, Einasleigh, or even Ravenswood and submit an observation of any species at all it is likely to be a ‘first’ for the location. We really don’t know what’s out there – and how can we look after what we don’t know?
Other projects
Encyclopedia of Life is a similar but older project. It welcomed citizen scientists from the outset but was almost overwhelmed by them for a while and now is primarily an inter-organisational data sharing project.
Atlas of Living Australia was a founding partner of EOL and now collects observations from iNaturalist. It is an open-access data resource, oriented more to the professional community than to citizen science.
BowerBird was founded in 2013 as a citizen science project of Museums Victoria and ALA but was folded into iNaturalist about 2019.
flickr is a photo-sharing platform which hosts self-managed Groups, some of which are wildlife-related. I joined (years ago) so that I could easily contribute to EOL (which collected sightings via one such group) but also enjoyed the Field Guide to Insects of Australia and the similar Australian Birds and Spiders groups. Each of them had (and probably still has) enthusiastic, knowledgeable members willing to encourage and support newcomers.
There’s no need to be bored!
See The most southerly mangroves in the world and The science of goannas for how ordinary people and scientists respectively can use iNaturalist in their research.
Facebook Groups, both public and private, have become increasingly popular as ways of learning and sharing information about plants and wildlife. They are often led by people with considerable expertise so they are convenient places for identification questions: “ID please” and a photo will usually get useful replies.
They do suffer from all of Facebook’s shortcomings, though. In particular, everything is ephemeral and information quality is unverifiable. But they have their place, so here’s a little list of NQ-relevant groups that I’ve come across.
facebook.com/groups/wildlifetownsville Wildlife North Queensland
facebook.com/groups/388789787979582 Insects & Invertebrates of FNQ
facebook.com/groups/beeawareofyournativebees Bee Aware of Your Native Bees (Australia)
Another:
facebook.com/groups/513920112873289 Native Plants Queensland – Townsville Group
An update to ALA, the scientific backbone of iNaturalist: https://www.ala.org.au/blogs-news/whats-in-a-name-refreshing-the-ala-taxonomy/