Curaçao - iNaturalist World Tour
Curaçao is the 109th stop on the iNaturalist World Tour. Curaçao sits between Aruba and Bonaire in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela. Here, top observers include visitors (e.g. @avocat @jasondombroskie @anudibranchmom @zahnerphoto @anthonysarkiss and @stanvrem), people doing research on the island (e.g. @wernerdegier studying symbiotic crustaceans) and people who live / have lived on Curaçao (e.g. @clifford and @patrickas). Somewhat unusually, 50% of the observations are from a project by California Academy of Sciences coral reef researcher @pimbongaerts which I'll describe at the end of this post.
While the number of observations per month has ticked up in recent years, the graph is dominated by @pimbongaerts field season in July of 2019.
West Indies bird expert @chrisharpe leads in bird IDs, @maractwin leads in fish IDs and @greenline leads in plant IDs. Other top identifiers include @adamwang. But the top identifier, leading in 'other animals' (in this case corals) is @ianespanol1 who was @pimbongaerts's Summer Systematics Institute at the California Academy of Sciences charged with identifying corals recorded during the field season.
@pimbongaerts (aka Pim Bongaerts) and @ianespanol1 (aka Ian X Espanol De La Cruz) are interested in conserving coral reefs. They used iNat to record and identify observations of 29 coral species from their field sites in Curaçao. Working with UC Santa Cruz researcher Collin Hurst, they used this data to train a coral classifier to explore if they could train the computer to recognize Caribbean coral species based on corallite-scale. Eventually, they hope to automate monitoring of coral biodiversity.
What can we do to get more people in Curaçao using iNaturalist? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread.
@pimbongaerts @avocat @jasondombroskie @anudibranchmom @zahnerphoto @ianespanol1 @chrisharpe @adamwang @maractwin @greenline
We’ll be back tomorrow in the El Salvador!
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