Jul 11, 2011

Environment 360 Blog Touts I School Final Project iNaturalist

From Environment 360

Tapping Social Media’s Potential To Muster a Vast Green Army

By Caroline Fraser

Last year, the spectacle of 80 million people flocking to the faux greenery of FarmVille, a social networking game on Facebook, held particular irony for environmentalists who have ritually bemoaned low levels of public interest in biodiversity. Every traditional method and media has been tapped to penetrate this elephantine indifference, from documentaries to dire predictions. Rarely a week goes by without reports on crashing ecosystems or mass extinction, a blizzard of bad news inspiring little more than hand-wringing.

But in the spirit of joining rather than beating, conservationists have begun embracing the enemy, the very force that alienated people from nature in the first place: technology....

Greene and a former graduate student developed a prototype for “NatureWorm,” a social networking site designed to kindle interest in natural history on a wide scale. Investment lagged, but the niche has been filled by other opportunistic organisms, such as iNaturalist.org, an online community created by students [Nathan Agrin, Jessica Kline, and Ken-ichi Ueda] at University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information where users can upload photos and hobnob about sightings. On a recent visit, “RussianNaturalistBrazil” had just posted an arresting image of Gongora meneziana, a fleshy, translucent red-spotted orchid found in Brazil’s Atlantic forest; Google maps pinpointed his location north of Salvador. Elsewhere on the site, a debate had broken out on the identification of a type of Indian paintbrush in California’s Wildcat Canyon....

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October 4, 2016