Celebrate Biodiversity Day at the Wilderness Park!

September 7, 2019 marks the first official celebration of California Biodiversity Day, an annual event created last year to celebrate the state’s exceptional biodiversity and encourage actions to protect it.  The city of Claremont Park Rangers together with the Friends of the Wilderness Park will be observing California Biodiversity Day 2019 at the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park.

Join us this Saturday, September 7th from 6:30am to 9:30am and learn how to use your phone to contribute to science and the Wilderness Park with iNaturalist!  Just look for the canopy near the North Mills entrance for more information!

Already an iNaturalist user?

Please come and help show others to use the iNaturalist app!

New to iNaturalist?

iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature. iNaturalist is a collaboration between National Geographic and the California Academy of Sciences.  Anyone can participate in iNaturalist!

Before arriving on Saturday please:

1. Go to iNaturalist.org and create a free account. You should see “SIGN UP” featured prominently on the homepage.   Otherwise, there’s a “Sign Up” link in the top right corner.
2. On your smart phone, go to the Apple Store or the Google Play store and download the iNaturalist app.

Once you’ve signed up, you can enter observations from either your phone or computer.  The iNaturalist site has a really good explanation here:

https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/getting+started

The page also has links to video tutorials.

The Wilderness Park Biota Project:

The Friends of the Wilderness Park have created an iNaturalist project for documenting the plants and animals of the Wilderness Park.  If you make iNaturalist observations in the Park, they will automatically be collected and added to the project!

If you’d like to check out the CHWP project and see what’s already been reported, just go here:

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/biota–of–the–claremont–hills–wilderness–park

A few tips for best practices:

• If feasible, crop your photos to feature the subject, especially if it’s not clear whether the subject is the bird or the tree, for example.
• Include a little description. For one thing, you can use the description to say what’s the subject.  But you can also note any additional details, interesting behavior, type of habitat, odors, etc. that may not be obvious from the photo.
• Give the most specific ID you can, even if it’s not to the species level. For instance, “insect”, “snake”, or even “plant” or “animal” is better than just having “unknown”.
• Give a little info about yourself in your profile — it increases your credibility.