iNaturalist eyes on Sandy Lake & Environs

As I write this post, we are in the midst of a “Nature Challenge” to residents of Halifax (HRM, Halifax Co)

“Help put Halifax Regional Municipality on the global nature scene! On April 26-29, 2019 over 165 cities across the planet, from Columbia to New Zealand to Calgary Alberta, will compete for the most Biodiverse City, and we need your help. Whether your an avid naturalist or a dog walker, everyone can participate: it’s easy, fun, and will encourage you to get outside. We will be using the iNaturalist digital platform to record observations, under this project.

Signup to iNaturalist today and then join our ‘City Nature Challenge 2019: Halifax Regional Municipality’ project!

If you’re new to iNaturalist, then we can help {either contact us via CNC2019HRM@gmail.com or follow instructions online at https://inaturalist.ca/}.

I am just back from away and haven’t been able to get out yet, ‘plan to go tomorrow (Monday, the last day of the Challenge) but I was delighted to see there are already lots of observations for the Sandy Lake area:

iNaturalist is exceptionally easy to use with a Smart Phone. Download the App, open it up, take a photo and submit and that’s it. It will offer some suggestions for the ID based on similarity to photos of species in their database (always expanding), you can pick one or not, but anyway, submit it and that counts towards the Halifax participation.

Sooner or later, an expert will check the photo and confirm the identification, or provide a new one, or conclude, for example, that it can be identified only to genus.

There’s also a newly updated iNaturalist App called SEEK, which offers an ID even before you guess at it.

So… if you love Sandy Lake & Enviorons, help us learn more about it as you do, using iNaturalist…today and tomorrow as part of the Nature Challenge, but please don’t stop there!

& Thx for your contributions Sybil and Ben!