iNaturalist is the world’s biggest online biodiversity citizen science platform, with 115 million observations of species from around the world. Australia is one of the top contributors to the platform, and your observations filter into the Atlas of Living Australia and are used in real-world scientific research.
During this webinar, presenter Thomas Mesaglio will explain the power of iNaturalist as a citizen science and research tool, provide a basic outline of how the platform operates, discuss what citizen scientists have contributed and how their data have been used from an Australian perspective, and explore the Great Southern BioBlitz and how you can contribute to this event.
About Thomas Mesaglio
Thomas Mesaglio is a PhD student at the University of New South Wales researching species discovery in, and knowledge of, Australian plants. Much of his research has focused on using iNaturalist data to answer questions relating to ecosystem recovery, identifiability across different taxa, and improving citizen science data quality, but he has also worked on bushfire recovery, marine forensic science and invertebrate taxonomy and ecology.
Thomas is a curator on the platform iNaturalist and a forum moderator on iNaturalist's discussion forum, and has made over 37,000 observations on the site, in addition to 216,000 identifications made for other users. He is also a regular BioBlitz organiser and participant, having organised the City Nature Challenge and Great Southern Bioblitz for Sydney, and the three recent Big Bushfire BioBlitzes across NSW.
This event will be run live via the Zoom platform. You will receive a link to access the zoom session in a reminder email a week before the webinar.