This is the eighteenth entry in an ongoing monthly (or almost monthly!) series profiling the amazing identifiers of iNaturalist.

Gall Week September 2023 runs from September 2nd to September 10th (gall observations from anywhere in the world are accepted), so I thought I’d feature a few of the folks involved with the creation of Gallformers.org, a website that is “The place to identify and learn about galls on plants in the US and Canada,” and was started by people who met through iNat and contribute a lot of gall identifications and information to gall observations made in that region! 

Plant galls are, according to Gallformers:

Abnormal growths of plant tissues, similar to tumors or warts in animals, that have an external cause--such as an insect, mite, nematode, virus, fungus, bacterium, or even another plant species…Plant galls are often complex structures that allow the insect or mite that caused the gall to be identified even if that insect or mite is not visible.

These structures are bizarre, beautiful, and sometimes barely noticeable, but they’re always fun to find and post to iNat - at least I think so. I encourage everyone to look for them the next time they’re out iNatting.

Below is an “oral history” from five people who were part of creating Gallformers. It’s cool to hear how they met on iNat and collaborated to create an excellent resource that’s its own entity and also using iNat data. And while Gallformers’ focus is on the United States and Canada, I think that it, like the Fly Guide, is a great model for how identification resources can be made for any taxa and region.

Finally, I kept this piece to five people for simplicity’s sake, but there are many, many people who’ve helped grow the gall community on iNaturalist, so I want to emphasize that. 

The people you’ll hear from below are:

Jeff Clark (@jeffdc): Gallformers co-founder and coder, based in the Washington, D.C area

Timothy Frey (@calconey): a Postdoctoral researcher studying microbial communities associated with crop rotation, cover crops, and soil health characteristics at the Ohio State University, based in the Ag Campus in Wooster, Ohio

Noriko Ito (@norikonbu): amateur naturalist and Gallformers volunteer, based in the San Francisco Bay Area

Adam Kranz (@megachile): the director of Gallformers and a private school math and science teacher based in Austin, Texas

Kimberlie Sasan (@kimberlietx): an Herbarium & Research Assistant at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, FWBG|BRIT 

(Some quotes have been lightly edited and I’ve tried to arrange them in a way that flows well, narratively.)

Adam: When I first became interested in galls in 2018, I was living in Detroit, Michigan and working as an in-home private tutor. My work took me all over the Detroit suburbs and I often had awkward periods of time between sessions, so I spent a lot of time visiting little parks. At first, I made it my goal to learn as many local taxa as I could and identify them on iNat. This was a dream of mine for many years, and I had a big backlog of photos I'd never been able to identify for lack of expert guidance. iNat’s computer vision and social network suddenly made all of that possible.

Kimberlie: I've been a big fan of iNat for many years now and I often find myself going from one rabbit hole to another, as my journal posts will show.  In one such post in December 2019 I documented the various wooly galls of Texas because I couldn't find anyone who knew anything about them. I had also created a project for DFW Galls to help me see their diversity and begin to recognize differences in morphology. Over time, I met some other iNat folks interested in galls and we started to talk more and more about how to ID them. Once I tapped into the Biodiversity Heritage Library and found the original gall descriptions, the flood gates opened wide. 

Timothy: I got interested in galls during my undergrad when I took a class called Field and Woodland Fungi, which randomly had a lecture on galls. The biology was briefly explained in the class (hijacking plant cells for their own benefit) and I was fascinated. The class also included lots of pictures and I was struck by the incredible phenotypic diversity. This fascination with galls influenced my decision of which lab I chose for grad school and I chose to work in the lab of Chris Taylor on a gall-forming nematode, Meloidogyne incognita (Root-knot Nematode). My Ph.D. work focused on how it uses host chemical cues to locate a host root.  

I found out about iNat in 2019 as I was finishing up grad school, an intern of mine that summer suggested I check out the app. I was initially skeptical as other plant ID apps that I had tried had been quite lackluster, but I found the iNat computer vision actually worked pretty well, and I loved the distribution maps that the app makes. 

Noriko: Born and raised in Tokyo, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid 90’s and have spent much of my adult life here. I always liked nature and taking random photos but was not good at organizing them. I joined iNat in early 2020 when the pandemic started, so it wasn’t too long ago. Like many people during that time, I was desperately longing for something to do outside. I never liked any form of social media so I was a bit skeptical about sharing anything online in the beginning, but now I’m glad my positive experiences have been confirmed when the New York Times’ “The Nicest Place Online?” article came out. I found iNat was a good way to catalog what/where I’ve seen, otherwise I’d forget. I started out with spring wildflowers which had been my primary interest, then got into mushrooms when not much else was to be observed in the California winter, but didn’t discover galls until the summer of 2021.

Adam: The thing that kept me hooked was that there were so many easily filled gaps. If I could just upload a few dozen observations of a common local species, its ID would be automated forever. Because the site was growing rapidly at that point, the sooner we got those training observations collected, the more the computer vision model could help us stay on top of the flood of new ones. 

Of course, for that to be worth doing it had to be done right, which meant focusing on groups with accessible visual ID traits backed up by reliable scientific sources. I gravitated to things that were smaller and weirder, and started collecting resources for any groups that seemed accessible for me and set myself the task of identifying those observations in Michigan and nearby states. One of the most exciting resources I found in that process was @ceiseman's book Tracks & Signs of Insects and Other Invertebrates. That book had a brief chapter that just dipped into galls, so for the first year or so I worked on galls alongside leafminers and eggs and rust fungi and aphids and slugs and all sorts of other things. Whenever I found something I couldn't find in the book, I would tag Charley on iNat and he would try to answer from the resources he'd collected. Eventually he emailed me a copy of Weld's 1959 catalog Cynipid galls of the Eastern United States, and I started a little spreadsheet to keep track of everything I found there and in other sources. From there, I expanded my focus to all gall inducing taxa in North America.

Jeff: Not long after I found iNaturalist (Spring 2020) I was walking around in some local woods when I found a couple of oak galls. I knew what they were but as it turns out I knew hardly anything and there was so much to learn. I took photos of these galls and uploaded them to iNat. They were identified to species and my interest was piqued. 

Noriko: It was a bit of a shock when I realized that I didn’t know anything about galls because by that time, I thought I knew most things in nature pretty well. So I started looking them up and came across Ron Russo’s article called “Confession of a Gall Hunter” [PDF]. He explained beautifully how he got into it, and I was mesmerized. Soon after I started posting my gall observations on iNat, I found a project called Galls of California. “Is there a such thing?” I thought. “I wasn’t the only weirdo fascinated by this???” 

I joined the project in August 2021, bought Russo’s newly published book Plant Galls of the Western United States and read it cover to cover. Through the Galls of California project, I’ve learned so much from experienced gall observers/identifiers such as @nancyasquith, @garth_harwood, @merav, @leslie_flint, @graysquirrel (this list goes on)… and of course, Adam Kranz.

Kimberlie: By May 2020 Adam had created his first iNat guide on Fuzzy Oak Galls.  We were furiously messaging back and forth about all the species we could find information about. I was also learning more about how to photograph the galls to get a better identification.  Many of the taxon images for Celticecis sp came about from my experiments with cross sections and light boxes.

Timothy: I had been somewhat casually tracking gall incidence in my area for a few years prior and decided to upload a few galls to the app (and a few that I could not find an ID for on my own), this is where I first ran into Adam, who was the biggest gall identifier at the time. I quickly figured out that this was a place where my interest, curiosity, and passion could be put to use by helping to ID these interactions/organisms. I devoured most of the readily available gall literature (Weld’s cynipid books and Gagne’s midge book and papers), so that I could become more adept at IDing galls on the platform.

Jeff: Most of the gall literature was either PDF scans of old journal articles or books that were difficult or very expensive to obtain. This got me thinking about ways to improve the situation via technology. Almost at this exact same time Adam reached out on the iNat forums asking if anyone was interested in helping him build an ID tool and database for galls. Next thing I knew, I was building out Gallformers.org. I wrote and maintain the code and infrastructure for the site.

Adam: It quickly became clear that gall ID traits lent themselves extremely well to a non-dichotomous key format. Once the vision for that tool had planted itself in my mind, it became a minor obsession to make it a reality. I started posting about it on the iNat forum, first asking if the site's developers could help me expand the existing Guides feature, then asking for other existing platforms it could be built on and collaborators to do that building, and finally for collaborators to build it from scratch. I eventually got tremendously lucky and received a reply from Jeff Clark, a web developer who was then on sabbatical between jobs, had exactly the skill set we needed, and was one of a few users who had become excited about galls because I was interacting eagerly with their gall observations. He built the site in late 2020 and we've now been operating since 2021. 

I put a big push in to finish the oak gall wasp portion of our database over the summer of 2021, and in the process became personally obsessed with their taxonomy and biology. Fortunately, once the site existed, it attracted a lot of new and existing gall enthusiasts who took up responsibility for adding data on many other gall-inducing taxa.

Kimberlie: While Adam and Jeff were connecting and brainstorming about Gallformers.org I was collecting, rearing, and photographing as many oak galls as I could find.  It gave us some great photos for the website, and I learned a lot about rearing galls first-hand which I could share with others who were also new to learning about galls. Gallformers.org has been a great community and I'm thrilled to watch it take off like it has!

Noriko: About a year later, in the fall of 2022, Adam invited me to join Gallformers.org, probably because I was pestering him and other Gallformers admins too much about updating their website. I felt flattered but was going to decline his invitation because I didn’t think I could contribute much. I was (and still am) just an amateur naturalist without any academic/scientific background in this field. But he wrote back, “There are no commitments involved.” So I decided to give it a try.

After joining Gallformers, I started helping Adam with some tedious data entry for the phenology tool that he was developing (I’ve just written a little bit about it here). In the early months of this year, we started planning the first Spring Gall Week with @merav, and @naturesarchive produced a wonderful podcast interview with Adam about it. This was the first event where I actively started making IDs on other people’s gall observations.

Adam: I've shifted my focus from building the website to collaborating with scientists to study oak gall wasps. A lot of my engagement with iNat now is to encourage people to collect and rear undescribed and understudied wasps for description and sequencing projects. To calibrate the timings for those collections, one of my big projects has been to accumulate a database of gall phenology data and share it using a web interface. I recently built a web extension that dramatically reduces the friction in adding observation field values to observations, which is necessary for collecting that data from iNat.

Jeff: As for the identification of galls, I tend to stick to the Cynipids, but these days I end up identifying tons of Eastern North American Oaks as well. I use Gallformers to help, much better than my faulty memory! After knowing Adam only virtually for 2+ years we finally had the chance to meet this past July when I was in Austin on a business trip (see the photo). Besides meeting Adam and a bunch of other great people via iNat, I also met the love of my life (@izafarr) via iNat!

Kimberlie: In October 2020, the year of the Gallformers boom, local botanist Bob O'Kennon (@bob777) invited me to see a gall he had found that I didn't recognize from the literature. It turned out to be an undescribed species, and with the help of Miles Zhang (@mileszhang), we published it in July 2022 as a new species, Druon laceyi. 

Adam: All of that work paid off this summer when I had the chance to go to the 8th International Plant Gall Symposium in Chico, California. I brought something like 60 undescribed wasp collections to send back to taxonomists in Australia, Hungary, and Spain. But the coolest part of that conference was that almost every presentation about North American gall inducers included photos by Gallformers contributors on iNat and acknowledgements for us at the end. It was really satisfying to see that our work was paying off in connecting the amateur and scientific communities in such a mutually rewarding way.

Noriko: After Adam returned from the 8th International Plant Gall Symposium, he is now full of new ideas/projects and busier than ever, so I hope to continue helping anyway I can, and am excited to see where Gallformers is headed.

I consider Adam and Nancy as my mentors because they really took me under their wings and taught me with patience. Without their support, I don’t think I’m here today. And thanks to iNat and Gallformers, I’m meeting many interesting people: other iNatters who invite me to go hiking together because they also think what I see is “cool”. Oak experts who comment on my hybrid oak observations and share their knowledge and passionate discussions. Top researchers who ask me to send specimens and let me know what they found about them. Who’d have thought I could find a community that I feel proud to be a part of, through these anomalies called… “galls”!

Gall tips and resources:

Noriko recommends @nancyasquith’s resources here, which focus on North American galls but also includes resources/info for galls in general. 

From Timothy

Galls can be found anywhere, this is one of the things that I find appealing about them – rest areas, edges of parking lots, cemeteries and other forgotten spaces usually contain galls, you will be surprised by how many you can find in your backyard.

1. Consider that galls have evolved with their host plants – this means that you are much more likely to find galls (population # and diversity) on native plants rather than exotic plants (although they often contain some gall species that have traveled with them as well). A site with a large diversity of native plants is likely to have the largest diversity of galls.
2. Consider a site where trees have branches that are accessible to you without having to climb – parks, cemeteries, forests along roads or other edges are easier to find galls in compared to an open forest which may have few accessible leaves.
3. Consider a site with a grassland component – in addition to having trees with more accessible limbs, many grassland plants also have quite a lot of gall diversity (ex: goldenrods and other Asteraceae here in the Midwest US)
4. Take the time to turn over leaves, many species only occur on the bottom surface of leaves and may not be noticeable before looking at the underside.
5. Many gall-forming organisms are carried at least short distances with prevailing winds and I have found that edges of woods that have an area that is exposed to prevailing winds often have a high gall density (usually western or southern edges here in NE Ohio.).
6. Galls are seasonal – you may find different species on the same plants at different times of the year (particularly true of the Oak Gall Wasps). There are often different species present in spring than are present during summer and fall. In general late summer (August/September here in NE Ohio) seems to have the greatest density of species.

The most important thing to ID galls is to “Know thy host” – Can you ID the host? If so, ID as narrowly as possible, galls are often fairly host-specific.

1. I recommend the following shots of a gall for it to get identified on iNat: 
2. Upper surface 
3. Lower surface (even if there appears to be nothing there) 
4. A wider shot with context (leaf, stem etc that the gall is on, ideally with the gall itself still visible), this shot is missed frequently but is extremely helpful in confusing cases. 
5. Further pictures of the host and gall if the ID of the host is uncertain. 
6. A photo of the cross-section.

Photos, from top to bottom:Spiny Leaf Gall Wasp (Diplolepis polita) by @mileszhang, Adam Kranz (left) and Jeff Clark (right), Timothy Frey, Noriko Ito, Kimberlie Sasan, Adam Kranz (center) with other researchers at the 8th International Plant Gall Symposium.

Our Observation of the Week is this Caspian Bent-toed Gecko (Tenuidactylus caspius), seen in Azerbaijan by @kseniiamarianna!

“When the first lockdown started in 2020, I was living in Türkiye in an old building, which was home not only to people, but also to inconspicuous yet cute reptiles: geckos,” says Kseniia Prondzynska, who tells me she grew up in Ukraine and Poland and has “always had a soft spot for animals considered to be ugly or scary by most people, such as snakes, toads, spiders, snails, etc.” While she was interested in nature, she did eventually become a translator, as languages are another passion of hers.

As I suddenly had too much free time and not a lot of opportunities to go out, I started paying more attention to my little “neighbors” and I became truly fascinated with them. As the restrictions were lifted, I started searching for geckos in other cities and countries (I’ve always been an avid traveler).

She found iNat in June of 2020 and has been active since - initially observing but then helping others with identifications. 

First I treated my gecko love as a hobby, but over time I realized that there were plenty of unanswered questions considering geckos’ ecology and the way they expand their ranges by natural and anthropogenic means. I accidentally found several introduced gecko populations in the Caucasus and Central Asia and that’s how I decided I would like to become a professional herpetologist. 

I’m currently a PhD candidate at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine. Due to the ongoing war in my homeland I’m not able to conduct research in Ukraine, but I’ve been really lucky to receive a grant from European Molecular Biology Organization to continue my work at Bülent Ecevit University in Zonguldak, Türkiye. My research project is related to the population genetics of native and introduced populations of geckos belonging to the genus Tenuidactylus.

Kseniia came across the gecko you see above while searching for lizards at night in Azerbaijan, where they appear to be an introduced species.  

It seems that the geckos arrived there by railway – as weird as it sounds, geckos actually often travel by trains! Since many gecko species are synanthropic (that is, they live close to people), they often get accidentally transported with cargo. If the climate at the destination is suitable for them, they can easily establish a new population.

As you might suspect from their common name, this gecko species is native to the Caspian Sea region, although they have spread to other areas. In their 2014 paper, Hojati and Savasari found that this species’ preferred prey in their study region in northern Iran preferred eating mosquitoes and house flies, and that males are slightly larger than females. 

“They are mostly active at night and I obviously catch the attention of local people while searching for geckos with a flashlight ☺,” says Kseniia (above, with a Large Whip Snake in Turkey). 

Being an extremely shy person, I used to be terrified of these interactions, but now I use them to educate people about reptiles and to answer their questions. There are many misconceptions about reptiles, so I hope I can both help people overcome their fears and save some critters’ lives. I also find it crucial to promote ethical research. I get really upset each time I read a paper in which the authors state they sacrificed dozens of animals for science, while it wasn’t necessary at all. Using modern technologies, the vast majority of research objectives can be achieved without killing the animals. Even if we work with a super common species, like the Caspian Geckos, I believe it’s important to remember that each life matters!

I would like to thank iNaturalist for bringing me closer to nature, helping me to become a researcher and connecting me with like-minded people from all over the world! Love and peace to everyone.

(Photo of Kseniia by Maria Jonker. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- two introduced gecko populations Kseniia found are Tenuidactylus bogdanovi in Kazakhstan, and Tenuidactylus caspius in Georgia. The former can compete with local Mediodactylus russowii geckos, so Kseniia says the population should be monitored.

We released a new computer vision model today. It has 78,387 taxa up from 77,276. This new model (v2.6) was trained on data exported last month on July 16th and added 1,399 new taxa.

Taxa differences to previous model

The charts below summarize these new taxa using the same groupings we described in past release posts.

By category, most of these new taxa were insects and plants

Here are species level examples of new species added for each category:

• Arachnida
• Fungi
• Plantae
• Reptilia
• Amphibia
• Actinopterygii
• Chromista
• Insecta
• Animalia
• Mollusca
• Mammalia
• Aves

Click on the links to see these taxa in the Explore page to see these samples rendered as species lists. Remember, to see if a particular species is included in the currently live computer vision model, you can look at the “About” section of its taxon page.

We couldn't do it without you

Thank you to everyone in the iNaturalist community who makes this work possible! Sometimes the computer vision suggestions feel like magic, but it’s truly not possible without people. None of this would work without the millions of people who have shared their observations and the knowledgeable experts who have added identifications.

In addition to adding observations and identifications, here are other ways you can help:

• Share your Machine Learning knowledge: iNaturalist’s computer vision features wouldn’t be possible without learning from many colleagues in the machine learning community. If you have machine learning expertise, these are two great ways to help:
• Participate in the annual iNaturalist challenges: Our collaborators Grant Van Horn and Oisin Mac Aodha continue to run machine learning challenges with iNaturalist data as part of the annual Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference. By participating you can help us all learn new techniques for improving these models.
• Start building your own model with the iNaturalist data now: If you can’t wait for the next CVPR conference, thanks to the Amazon Open Data Program you can start downloading iNaturalist data to train your own models now. Please share with us what you’ve learned by contributing to iNaturalist on Github.
• Donate to iNaturalist: For the rest of us, you can help by donating! Your donations help offset the substantial staff and infrastructure costs associated with training, evaluating, and deploying model updates. Thank you for your support!

Our Observation of the Week is this pair of mating Myrmecopsis kenedyae tiger moths, seen in Trinidad and Tobago by @brystrange!

“I was walking alone through the northwestern rainforest of Trinidad one evening, when I saw what I thought to be two wasps on the leaf of a short plant,” says Bryan Ramdeen, a Biology student at the University of the West Indies and a member of the Trinidad and Tobago Field Naturalists’ Club (TTFNC). 

Without hesitation, I immediately aimed my camera and took a photograph. Only when I zoomed in on the photo and noticed the antennae did I realize that they were in fact moths (wasp-mimicking moths) in front of me. I became excited as I’ve seen these moths before on iNaturalist and I knew they were an uncommon species, so I took a couple more photographs.

Trinidad and Tobago is home to a number of really cool wasp moths in the subtribe Euchromiina, which is in the family Erebidae (check out photos and a guide to some of them here). Many do mimic wasps quite well, sporting transparent wings and narrow wasp-like “waists,” which is believed to deter predators. As Bryan mentioned, their antennae are a bit feathery/hairy upon closer inspection, which his photos clearly show. 

While Bryan’s main interest is spiders, he’s fascinated by all wildlife and tries to document as much as he can.

Having obtained a camera in 2021, documenting the wildlife around me became much easier, especially with a macro lens. I try to go on walks through the rainforests of my islands as often as I can, with hopes of coming across unknown or uncommon species, especially spiders. I am not currently involved in any active research, but I plan to do extensive research on the various spider species found in Trinidad and Tobago.

He uses iNaturalist for his research on spiders, and is the top spider identifier in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as the Lesser Antilles. 

I use iNaturalist to share my own observations with the world as the biodiversity in Trinidad and Tobago is very rich due to it once being part of South America. Thus, there are a lot of undescribed species (especially arthropods) to be discovered and documented, which I hope to contribute to. Lastly, I use iNaturalist for leisure. It brings me much joy and fun to spend hours on iNaturalist seeing and identifying people’s observations and having them identify mine.

iNaturalist has definitely changed the way I see the world. I am now constantly looking around me for wildlife everywhere I go, which has actually made me more observant and better at finding it. iNaturalist helps me connect with people across the world who have similar interests as me. I am grateful to have gained so much knowledge about the organisms around me from identifications by other naturalists.

(Photo of Bryan by Shenelle Ramkhelawan (@sheneller). Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- @sheneller's black-veined hairstreak butterfly was an Observation of the Week back in 2021!

- Take a look at the most-faved spider observations from Trinidad and Tobago!

Our Observation of the Week is this White-necked Rockfowl (Picathartes gymnocephalus, Picatharte de Guinée in French), seen in Côte d'Ivoire by @sgodoukpe!

Saint Guillaume Odoukpe, an Assistant Professor of Animal Biology and Ecology at Felix Houphouet-Boigny University, traces his current interest in birds back to 2009,

when I was carrying out a study on birds for my master’s dissertation. At the time, I didn't know anything about birds, except that they are animals that have feathers. With a pair of binoculars and a bird guide containing mostly black-and-white illustrations, I explored my study site and searched for these exceptional fauna. It was the first time that I had seen the beauty and diversity of birds in an environment; you just had to look up and pay a bit of attention to observe them. Each time I identified a species of bird, my scientific interest gradually gave way to a passion for birds and nature.

Cut to June of this year, when Saint Guillaume explored the Lamto Scientific Reserve in central Côte d'Ivoire on a trip sponsored by the International Bird Conservation Partnership (IBCP) and its President and Scientific Director Dr. Nico Arcillia. Saint Guillaume, along with Dr. Abiola Sylvestre Chaffra and Mr. Farid Amadou Bahleman from Benin, Mr. Yendoubouam Kourdjouak and Mr. Lin-Ernni Mikégraba Kaboumba from Togo, surveyed the reserve.

This ornithological tour was requested and organised by Dr Nico to encourage collaboration between West African ornithologists, who receive little support from donors. The objectives of the tour were to promote a better understanding of the status of bird populations and their habitats, and of the threats and challenges facing birds in Côte d'Ivoire. It also aimed to identify priorities for collaboration and capitalize on bird research and conservation efforts in Côte d'Ivoire that can be applied in Togo, Benin, and neighbouring countries.

The following day, after a few observations in the reserve, we went to the birds’ breeding area outside the reserve. Once there, we were able to observe a few nests under construction and nests already containing eggs [above]. After waiting for an hour, we observed two individuals returning to their nests. We were able to get some photos and videos of them. To better understand and protect the species, we plan to carry out a study of its ecology and ethology, and to develop an ecological monitoring system which will be carried out by the local communities.

A species with almost no feathers on its head, White-necked rockfowl range from Guinea to Ghana in West Africa, and like to live by forested streams and rivers, where they can find mud for their nests. Adults mostly feed on insects, but will feed frogs to their offspring. Formerly captured for display in zoos, they're mostly threatened by habitat loss and are listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN Redlist. There are currently fewer than 40 observations of this species on iNaturalist.

“I heard about iNaturalist from my friend Farid Bahleman last November when we were in Victoria Falls for the fifteenth Pan-African Ornithological Congress,” says Saint Guillaume (above, in front).  His current research

focuses on bird ecology and conservation biology, both in their natural environment and in agro-ecosystems. I am also interested in bird migration and the illegal wildlife trade, which are underdeveloped issues in Côte d'Ivoire...

I like nature and photographing birds. iNaturalist gives me the opportunity to share these photos and this passion with other people who like nature. The interaction with the naturalist community allows me to update my knowledge of bird systematics and guides me in my research perspectives.

(Photo of Saint Guillaume by Ouassa Félix. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- An Amorphophallus dracontioides plant seen by Farid Bahleman (@bahleman) was an Observation of the Week back in 2021!

- the team at BBC made a cool video piece about Picathartes.

Our Observation of the Week is the first Rhynchocorys odontophylla plant posted to iNaturalist! Seen in Iraq by @aryathesage.

“My love of nature has been greatly influenced by my parents,” says Arya, a fifth year medical student at the University of Sulaymaniyah (UOS). “Both of them were and still are greatly enthusiastic about the natural world, especially my mom. Their shared interest has been passed down to me and my sister as well, however, it has become much more concentrated in me!”

Arya’s first interest in animals was dinosaurs (“I think most children go through some form of dinosaur phase, but mine has lasted for 20 years.”), and it’s expanded to both living organisms and geological phenomena like rocks, minerals, and mountains.

“After developing an interest in mountains, I started acting on that interest in the most basic form: going hiking! As luck would have it, Kurdistan, where I’m from, is a perfect place to satisfy the needs and wants of a mountaineer,” he explains. Arya soon became interested in the trees he saw, and that led him to iNaturalist.

[iNaturalist] opened a whole new door for me in a way I hadn’t realized before. Seeing all of these people here from all over the world sharing pictures of flora and fauna that was around them made me feel more aware of nature than ever before. I started paying more attention to the trees, the wild flowers, the bugs, the birds, even the moss growing on the ground. So, I did what everyone here on iNat did and started taking pictures of everything I could. 

When I shared those pictures on the site for the first time and some people helped identify them, it was a great feeling. A feeling that I had done something worthwhile rather than sitting idly on my computer all day. After a while of sharing photos I was curious to see what other people from Kurdistan had shared on iNat before me and what I saw was a bit underwhelming. Not in the way of quality, but in quantity. There were only about a thousand observations made from Iraqi Kurdistan and most of them were of insects and animals rather than plants. So from that moment I took it upon myself as some sort of a calling or a goal to share all the beautiful plants I find on my hikes with the world through this site.

Now it’s been over one year since my first observation and as I promised myself I think I’ve reached that goal by adding many new observations from Kurdistan, however, that doesn’t mean I’ll stop doing what I love any time soon. As long as I can go out in nature and take photos of the wildlife I will keep sharing the wonders of my homeland with the world. 

My goal was hard to fulfill at first because my dad would have trouble letting me go on nature hikes alone and for good reason. Nature hikes aren’t a walk in the park here since there are many things that could pose threats…This is why my dad said that I had to find a partner to go with and not alone. I didn’t really have anyone I could go with since the family were usually busy, friends didn’t have energy for hikes, and hiking groups wouldn’t really go at my pace. This problem was solved for me by my dear and beloved grandmother [above], who convinced my dad to let me go with the condition that I take her with me. She came with me on almost 80% of my hikes this year and kept me company behind the camera even on the longest of journeys. Even though she can’t walk for long distances, let alone hike, she wanted me to do what I enjoy and came with me to all the beautiful places I visited. So I have her to thank for my love of nature as well, because without her I wouldn’t have been able to see half the plants or the places that I have seen to date.

Last month, one of those hikes was a family trek (this one without Arya’s grandmother) to Bekodyan Pond, located high in the mountains of what will be Halgurd-Sakran National Park. 

The fact that you can find snow at the top even in July and August has made this mountain pond a top destination for local hikers, but the journey towards it is not easy and requires endurance. Me, my sister, my three cousins and my uncle started our trek to the pond early in the morning from our camp around 6 am trying to reach the pond by 12 pm. As we trekked further away from our camp and more into the valley that led to our destination, I started noticing more and more beautiful flowers that I had not seen around my hometown of Sulaymaniyah (Slemani in Kurdish).

I started lagging behind my team because I was slowing down every 20-30 meters to take photographs of the beauty all around me. I found the plant in question in one of these quick stops because the strange shape of its petals - the top one especially shaped like a duck’s head with a long beak - grabbed my attention even from afar. I had never seen something like it before and honestly didn’t know even to which family it belonged (I was thinking it might be a part of Lamiaceae [mint family] at first). Of course, after taking the photos at the time I didn’t think much more of it and resumed running after my teammates who’d left me far behind and were nowhere in sight.

Unfortunately the group didn’t reach Bekodyan Pond, but Arya says “in the end, the trip was a success for me when it comes to finding beautiful plants to photograph and quite honestly one of my most pleasant hiking experiences.”

Arya was close: Rhynchocorys odontophylla definitely belongs to the order Lamiales, which includes mints, but is currently listed as being in the family Orobanchaceae, most of which are parasitic.  It was first documented in Iraq only a few years ago, making it the third species of the genus seen in the country.

“I am not an academic botanist, as I said before my actual topic of study is medicine, but that hasn’t stopped me from having a huge interest in native species of plants,” says Arya (above, near Kani Rash waterfall).

My interest in botany is a hobby more than anything at the moment, because I really can’t afford to be more focused on it than on my future career as a doctor. What’s great about iNaturalist is that it affords people like me the opportunity to share their photographs even if they’re not familiar with the species or even the genus, because there are so many good-natured naturalists who can tell the species even from a bad photograph and can help you in the identification process. In this way I can say that I’ve made some good friends and acquaintances on this site, by asking for their opinions and receiving their generous help in the identification of my unknown or unfamiliar photographs. I can go as far as say that I’ve learned more about plants from them than I would have if I was taking a course in college, and I am forever grateful for their knowledge and the assistance they’ve given me.

(Some quotes have been lightly edited.)

- This short video follows a group hiking to Bekodyan Pond, with some nice looks at the flowers along the way.

- There are over eight thousand verifiable observations from Iraq, here are the most-faved!

- Previous parasitic plant Observations of the Week include posts from Taiwan, Jordan, and Ecuador!

This week we passed 150 million observations! While the number of observations has been growing steadily over time, observations per month passed 5 million for the first time this summer.

These observations aren’t equally distributed across space. The map below bins observations in each of 64,800 1x1 degree grid cells covering the globe. Most are in North America and Europe and other hotspots like Taiwan, Eastern Australia, Cape Town etc.

In the past posts, we’ve explored how observations are unevenly distributed across species. In the graph below, we’re doing the same with land area. The black line ranks all land surface (excluding Antarctica) 1x1 degree cells by number of observations. On the left are cells that encompass very observose cities such as Hong Kong with nearly 1 million observations. On the right are cells with very few observations such as the cell encompassing Kananga in the Congo Basin of Africa with just 3 observations. 40% of non-Antarctica land surface cells have no observations at all.

This graph shows how that line has shifted to the right as iNaturalist has grown from 50 million observations (dark green line) to 100 million observations (middle green line) and to 150 million observations (light green line). The percentage of land surface excluding Antarctica with at least 1,000 observations has grown from 12% to 20% with this tripling of observations.

This 1,000 observation threshold is a totally arbitrary cutoff representing grid cells with reasonably high densities of observations. Mapping them we can see light green (cells reaching 1,000 observations from the most recent 50 million observations) encroaching into gaps on the map. As is the case with tallying rare species, tallying observations from remote places proceeds much slower than the overall number of observations since most observations come from a relatively small number of places.

The graph below shows these changes in the percentage of cells with at least 1,000 observations for the United States, China, Africa, and Europe (excluding Russia which spans Europe and Asia).

In Europe (excluding Russia) and the United States, most cells now have over 1,000 observations (78% and 70% respectively). However, the percentage of cells with over 1,000 observations in Europe has increased relatively rapidly (from 53% to 78%) as observations across Eastern Europe fill in. In contrast the percentage of cells in the US is increasing more slowly (from 61% to 70%) as the remaining cells with few observations are in remote areas like northern Alaska. In Africa and China the percentages of cells with at least 1,000 observations is much lower (14% and 9% respectively).

Many parts of the world have few observations because they are so remote and so few people live there. It’s unclear what we can do to encourage more observations from such places. But as projects like City Nature Challenge show, it’s possible to get lots of participation from places where lots of people live. The graph below shows the 590 cities with populations over 750,000 people in 2010 ranked by number of observations. Cities in North America and Europe are colored in green while cities in Asia and Africa are in gray. Cities from other continents are shown in white. Most of the places in the world where lots of people live and we have few observations are in Asia and Africa. Engaging more people who live near these cities will be important part of increasing the geographic distribution of iNaturalist observations moving forward.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this 150 million observation milestone! If you’re inspired to donate, you can do so via the link below.

Donate to iNaturalist

Our Observation of the Week is this Echeveria racemosa plant, seen in Mexico by @sarahdiaz17!

A biology graduate of Universidad Veracruzana, Sarahí Díaz was “born and raised in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, a city between the mountains, so from a very young age I had a direct connection with animals and plants.” She now resides in Coatepec, Veracruz, which is near a cloud forest. 

Whenever my personal activities allow me, I go out to photograph organisms (mainly plants), to upload these observations to the platform, and thus reach the eyes of amateurs and experts. I agree with the idea that “what is unknown is not protected”.

Sarahí tells me she found the Echeveria racemosa by accident. When returning to the site of a Sedum population to check on its conservation, 

I found another path that I had not yet explored and decided to see what else I could find. The surprise was that I found this well-preserved population of Echeveria. As soon as I was able to download the photos, I asked Dr. David Jimeno, teacher and researcher for the group, for help with identification. He was the one who helped me with the ID and that's when I uploaded it to Naturalista [iNaturalist’s name in Mexico], hoping that other researchers would confirm the identification.

A member of the stonecrop family (Crassulaceae), Echeveria plants range from northern Mexico to northern Argentina and have succulent leaves which grow in a rosette shape. Brightly colored flowers grow on a long stalk. This observation is one of only thirteen Echeveria racemosa observations currently on iNaturalist.

“Interaction with nature through hiking and my love for wild plants has always existed,” says Sarahí (above, in the Sierra Madre Occidental), “but Naturalista has definitely been the catalyst to learn more about the vegetation that surrounds me and share it with the rest of the community.”

Thanks to these observations, I have had the great happiness of collaborating in the discovery and description of two new species for science [still to be published], which means that now every opportunity I have to go out to a new place, I observe in great detail new shapes and colors and everything that I have not photographed before, I capture and share with the naturalist community, since a third collaboration would not be bad for me. 😊

(Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- The naturalist who took Sarahí's photo is @pioleon, the coauthor of a paper which described Gonolobus naturalistae, a plant named for iNaturalist!

We released a new computer vision model today. It has 77,276 taxa up from 76,129. This new model (v2.5) was trained on data exported last month on June 18th and added 1,454 new taxa.

Taxa differences to previous model

The charts below summarize these new taxa using the same groupings we described in past release posts.

By category, most of these new taxa were insects and plants

Here are species level examples of new species added for each category:

• Amphibia
• Actinopterygii
• Protozoa
• Reptilia
• Chromista
• Arachnida
• Aves
• Insecta
• Fungi
• Other Animalia
• Mollusca
• Mammalia
• Plantae

Click on the links to see these taxa in the Explore page to see these samples rendered as species lists. Remember, to see if a particular species is included in the currently live computer vision model, you can look at the “About” section of its taxon page.

We couldn't do it without you

Thank you to everyone in the iNaturalist community who makes this work possible! Sometimes the computer vision suggestions feel like magic, but it’s truly not possible without people. None of this would work without the millions of people who have shared their observations and the knowledgeable experts who have added identifications.

In addition to adding observations and identifications, here are other ways you can help:

• Share your Machine Learning knowledge: iNaturalist’s computer vision features wouldn’t be possible without learning from many colleagues in the machine learning community. If you have machine learning expertise, these are two great ways to help:
• Participate in the annual iNaturalist challenges: Our collaborators Grant Van Horn and Oisin Mac Aodha continue to run machine learning challenges with iNaturalist data as part of the annual Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference. By participating you can help us all learn new techniques for improving these models.
• Start building your own model with the iNaturalist data now: If you can’t wait for the next CVPR conference, thanks to the Amazon Open Data Program you can start downloading iNaturalist data to train your own models now. Please share with us what you’ve learned by contributing to iNaturalist on Github.
• Donate to iNaturalist: For the rest of us, you can help by donating! Your donations help offset the substantial staff and infrastructure costs associated with training, evaluating, and deploying model updates. Thank you for your support!

Our Observation of the Week is this group of Straw-coloured Fruit Bats (Eidolon helvum, Roussette paillée africaine in French), seen in Benin by @gbiribou!

“I have been interested in nature since childhood thanks to my father, who is also in this field, and through my studies,” says Roméo Gbiribou. who goes by Gbiribou. At university, Gbiribou studied planning and management of natural resources, and has since been working with his father’s conservation organization: ONG Espace Vert et Développement (ONG-EVD). 

“[The Straw-coloured Fruit Bat] habitat is right in the city and I would like to find a way to conserve them with the help of ONG-EVD,” explains Gbiribou. “But before that, we have to show their presence, and since they are almost threatened and very important for nature, it is important to me to protect them against poachers.” So he’s been observing them on iNaturalist to document the population.

This bat species, while widespread and living in communities of over 100,000 individuals, is listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN, due to deforestation and hunting/persecution by humans. The plan to protect this population, Gbiribou says, is to raise awareness of the bats and to build barriers and prohibition plates to prevent poaching. “Finally, we are going to reforest and strengthen the habitat. A monitoring and management committee will also be set up to oversee all of this.”

Gbiribou (above) heard about iNat via the German company GIZ, who supports his group’s activities, and their Program Manager Mr. Horst. “So I tried iNaturalist, and it's now part of our working tools,” he explains. “We also use it for environmental education sessions with children and young people.”

I use iNaturalist primarily to find out about plant and animal species around me. Thanks to iNaturalist, I learned to recognize several species of birds and plants like Sesamun radiatium (many impressive articles on this plant and its family). Then iNaturalist allows me to make biodiversity inventories  of the sites of conservation interest on which we work with our NGO. And finally, iNaturalist allows us to share this data with anyone, at any time, allowing us to highlight our work.

(Gbiribou’s responses were in French and were translated with the help of Google and @sylvainmorin. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- This observation is in Afribats, one of the oldest projects on iNaturalist! (It’s project #197)

- Straw-coloured fruit bats migrate in huge numbers near the end of the year. Here’s some footage of them emerging at night in Kasanka National Park, Zambia, a major migration destination.