Diario del proyecto NatureMap-plants

The iNaturalist community is helping to bolster flowering plant distribution records worldwide, and through this project we have been aiming to improve the quality and quantity of observations for Ethiopia, India, Indonesia and Turkey.

The data, alongside many others, have fed into a series of global analyses and maps. You can see the new global map of areas important for the conservation of biodiversity and carbon storage here - https://explorer.naturemap.earth/map - and watch a webinar to find out more about how the maps are made. Your feedback through Nature Map Explorer on these initial maps, how they are explained or how they/what else might be useful, is very much welcomed.

Thank you for all your support so far!

We just exceeded our first big milestone, thanks especially to a great boost in new observations in India and Turkey.

We are planning to start updating existing range maps and attempt to map new species ranges in September and we'll post information here on how we plan to do this.

For this effort to be most effective we would need as many species as possible to be of Research Grade, meaning that they need to be species identified at the species level with some level of confidence, and they need to be genuine wild specimens (not planted by humans), so we ask everyone's help with identification and with ticking the box No on örganism is wild" from the computer or flag the species as Captive/Cultivated from the phone.

thank you all for the effort, and please get in touch for any questions!
Piero

There is now a new set of projects for Planted (not wild) observations accessible here : https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/planted-in-naturemap-countries

One of the issues that we are coming across with this effort to improve the data on wild flowering plants is that a lot of observations of plants that are planted (not naturally occurring) still need to be tagged. iNaturalist rules that even exotic species are eligible for Research Grade, but only if they have spread themselves (eg the seedling of a planted tree). There are quite a few planted specimens turning up as Research Grade in the Naturemap collection projects.

If you are marking up an observation of a pot plant or a street tree as 'not wild', it would be super if you also point the users to the appropriate project - e.g. "Your observation will appear in the new project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/planted-in-india , where users can help one another to identify garden and house plants, street trees, crops and so on. Please do feel free to join. "

A particular thank you to those who have been identifying observations within the collection project. There's a pressing need for help identifying plant species records in these countries - thank you so much for helping others with their understanding of the flora and in the progress towards Research Grade records for GBIF.

This new project in the Naturemap collection has been created to make it easy to find completely unidentified records from our focal countries, which could be flowering plants. Anybody can help by classifying these as Angiosperms (obviously, more taxonomic detail is very welcome), or as e.g. Insects. Thank you in advance!

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/unknowns-of-naturemap