The new project organized by the Department of Biology allows anyone to document the variety of fungi, animals, plants and more on Elon’s 636-acre campus.
The Elon Biology Department has launched an effort to involve the community in documenting the wide array of plant and animal species on Elon’s 636-acre campus.
Established Sept. 9 by Antonio Izzo, associate professor and chair of the Department of Biology, the new Elon biodiversity project relies upon iNaturalist, an online program that charts observations of biodiversity.
It was two summers ago that another faculty member, Assistant Professor of Biology Jen Hamel, began using an efficient and collaborative tool that could make such a project happen. She and her research students worked with local middle school students in the “Discover Science” camp that included collecting data for a citizen science project at Elon’s Loy Farm.
“The campers searched plants that were growing at Loy Farm and documented the different insects and other kinds of organisms that they found on the plants by taking photos while they were looking,” Hamel said. “We submitted the photos to the citizen science project using iNaturalist. The iNaturalist app allows people all over the world to collect observations by taking photos with their phones.”
Hamel saw iNaturalist as a useful tool, and Izzo had also come across the program independently and liked how it worked. Anyone can contribute to the project using iNaturalist. Users can create a free account and upload photos to the project using the website or the app. Once a photo is submitted, iNaturalist can suggest an identification for the organism.
“It scans a photo, and it looks for key features to compare against its database of things that are already named,” Izzo said.
The photo must be geotagged and timestamped so the observation can be mapped. Photos can also be uploaded to multiple projects that are hosted on iNaturalist. To see what’s been catalogued so far, visit https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/elon-university-campus-biodiversity-project.
iNaturalist was a key part of putting the Elon Biodiversity project together because it is user friendly. “It’s widely used; it’s used internationally,” Hamel said. “It’s used by researchers and enthusiasts. Anyone can use it, that’s the key. It’s super easy, it’s very intuitive, and you don’t have to know anything to use it. All you have to do is take a photo of the organism you’re seeing and upload it.”
As of Oct.1 102 species have been identified including wood ear fungi, luna moths, turtles, and wheel bugs.
The Elon biodiversity project draws on an earlier version of a similar effort Izzo launched in 2015 called the Elon Fungi Project. “That was iteration number one and since then this iNaturalist app really has taken it up about 20 notches. The software that they use is really what makes all of this possible,” Izzo said.
This effort is not only important to Hamel and Izzo because it is in their field of work, but because biodiversity is a crucial part to understanding the world, even to non-scientists. “Everyone needs to appreciate [biodiversity] on some level. Not everyone needs to know species names of everything, but to appreciate that this stuff is out there,” Izzo said.
Hamel and Izzo hope that this project can be used in classrooms or for larger research projects. “The hope would be to have really nice data sets that could be used for classes,” Izzo said.
Hamel said that this could also be a way to document how Elon’s landscape changes. “It’s really cool to think about how it might be useful in the future. You can imagine coming back here five years from now, and the campus has changed over time. Documenting what’s here now might be both interesting and informative for people in future years,” Hamel said.
Even though this project is only a few weeks old, Hamel and Izzo are excited for what it could bring in the future. “We’re on that up curve right now. Things are really starting to fly and it’s ongoing,” Izzo said. “This is going to continue for years.”