In the 1880s, the Champlain Society documented the flora and fauna on the land that would become Acadia National Park. If the Champlain Society were around today, would they use iNaturalist? Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park: www.schoodicinstitute.org

Olivia’s Balsam fir observation on iNaturalist: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/146220670

Dragonfly wing coloration study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2101458118

Schoodic Notes: https://schoodicnotes.blog/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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[Soundscape from Bass Harbor Head Light including buoy bells, waves lapping, and birdsong]

Olivia: Sea to Trees is brought to you by Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park. I’m Olivia Milloway.

Seth: Science is for everyone, and everyone is for science! Today, we’re inviting you to participate in our third, what we call four B’s: birds, barnacles, bugs, and…. Birches!

Olivia: That was Seth Benz, Schoodic Institute’s Bird Ecology Director, with Nick Fisichelli, the CEO, chiming in at the end. Back in August of 2022, Seth welcomed a group of volunteers who had gathered on Schoodic Institute’s campus. Even though it was still morning, temperatures were already in the 80s, and the twenty or so volunteers–the youngest, just five years old–were eager to start the day’s activity: the Birds, Bugs, Birches, and Barnacles BioBlitz. A BioBlitz is a short but concentrated effort to document the species living in a given area. Another word to describe this catalog of life is biodiversity. Biodiversity describes variation among individual genes, species, and entire ecosystems. Acadia’s biodiversity was one of the reasons the park was founded back in 1916. Acadia straddles the transition zone between temperate deciduous forests of the south and spruce-fir boreal forests of the north, providing a myriad of habitat types that offer homes to dozens of species of mammals, hundreds of species of birds, and nearly a thousand species of plants. Encompassing a mosaic of different ecosystems within its glacially-sculpted mountains and lakes, Acadia’s streams, wetlands, and upland forests are connected to over 40 miles of rocky shoreline and 80 or so coastal islands in the cold, productive waters of the Gulf of Maine. Porcupines, loons, and otters are neighbors to peregrine falcons, spotted salamanders, and mink. Acadia provides an important opportunity for animals to move uninterrupted from the sea to the trees along Maine’s coast. Despite the protection that comes with being a National Park, Acadia’s biodiversity is changing, and it’s important for the park to understand how in order to best protect its natural and cultural resources now and into the future. People in and around Acadia have been documenting biodiversity since before it was a park, and Seth told the volunteers that BioBlitzes are important tools to continue to document and understand how the environment is changing.

Seth: Here in Acadia National Park, we've been keeping track of things for over 150 years. We're very fortunate to be one of the few national parks in the country to have such a lineage of historical information all the way up to present. So, you're part of that effort, which we think is really important. It allows us to track what’s happening with all kinds of different insects, even trees, lichens, all those sorts of things. Once we get an explanation we’ll be maybe an hour and a half in the field taking photographs, then we’ll come back here…   Olivia: You’re listening to Sea to Trees, a podcast that tells the stories of the science happening in and around Acadia from the rocky shoreline to the evergreen forests to the granite mountaintops. In this first season of the show, we’re exploring the ever-growing field of citizen science and how it can help answer questions about our changing world. In this second episode, we’ll learn about iNaturalist, a web-based tool making citizen science and biodiversity data more accessible than ever. We’ve talked about iNaturalist a few times on the show already–so what is it, exactly?

Carrie: iNaturalist was created to connect people to nature through technology, and we are still doing that today. The way that iNaturalist does that is by providing a way for people to share their encounters with biodiversity, and collectively what emerges is an incredible dataset that tells you when and where different species were found all over the Earth.

Olivia: That was Carrie Seltzer, the Stakeholder Engagement Strategist at iNaturalist. If you’re using iNaturalist, you can create a record of the biodiversity you’ve encountered by sharing observations.

Carrie: An observation is a record of an organism in a place at a time. Mostly, observations are photo-based. You can also record sounds within the app and share those, but most of it is photo based. So you can either take a new photo if you're out in the field right now, see something cool, or you can pull in photos that you have already taken.

Olivia: If you can’t identify the organism–or, maybe you know it’s an evergreen tree, just not which one–iNaturalist’s powerful artificial intelligence will suggest potential matches. If even the AI is stumped, you should still upload the photo–this is where the knowledge and talents of other iNaturalist users comes in handy. Scientists and citizen scientists who are experts in their fields, identify these “unknown” observations or suggest corrections. I went into the forest around Schoodic Institute’s campus to test out the app.

Olivia (outside): So I am walking through the woods right now, and because I’m in the park I don’t have really good cell service, but that’s okay because whatever photos I take now I can upload when I’m back on wifi. Okay, so I’m seeing a conifer, which is a type of tree that has cones and needles, and I think this one is a balsam fir, but I’m not 100% sure. So, I’m going to go ahead and click the observe button in the app, take a few photos, and see if the iNat community can back me up on this ID.

Olivia: Taking photos of what I’m seeing outside is probably my favorite part of using iNaturalist because, regardless of if I have any clue of what I’m seeing, it makes me stop and think: what’s unique about what I’m seeing that could help someone identify it? Species ID is fun for me because it feels like I’m solving a puzzle; if you have just one piece of the puzzle–like for example, the tree I found that day had needles–that could only get me so far, because, well, lots of trees in Acadia have needles. But, if I can say something more specific, like the needles were about an inch long–I have a bigger piece of the puzzle. I decided to take a photo of the needles with my thumb for scale, so a potential identifier could infer their relative size. I looked for other characteristics that could be additional pieces to the species ID puzzle.

Olivia (outside): Now, I don’t know what the bark of a balsam fir is supposed to look like, but I do know that white pine, which is another common conifer species around here, has a really distinctive bark, so I’m going to take a photo of this tree’s bark. And, another thing I can think of is cones. A lot of conifers will have very distinctive cones whether that’s size or shape, but I’m not seeing any cones on this one, so I’m going to take a few steps back and I’m going to take one more photo of the whole tree because the general size and shape can be indicative of what the species is as well. Okay. Time to head back to wifi and get this uploaded.

Olivia: Once back inside, I uploaded the observation, and iNaturalist also suggested balsam fir as an ID. I waited for a community member to come along and confirm the species; once any observation gets two agreeing identifications it’s considered “research grade” and is available for scientists.

Carrie: iNaturalist now has a massive amount of biodiversity data and we've got records from every inhabited country in the world. Our role is really to make the data available, and get out of the way.

Olivia: iNaturalist makes millions of “research grade” data points available for download and use by scientists, with new observations added each day. Schoodic Institute projects, like Landscape of Change, have made use of these data.

Catherine: Landscape of Change is a collaborative project led by Mount Desert Island Historical Society, with Schoodic Institute, Acadia National Park, College of the Atlantic, Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, and a Climate to Thrive, to use historical data to document the changing environment of Mount Desert Island.

Olivia: That was Catherine Schmitt, Schoodic Institute’s Science Communication Specialist. Landscape of Change was inspired by the work of the Champlain Society, a group of Harvard Students who, in the summers of the 1880s, camped on Mount Desert Island and conducted the first comprehensive natural history survey of flora and fauna on the island.

Catherine: And they kept really detailed records, and they wrote it all down in thousands of pages of logbook entries and scientific reports. If they were out there today, they would absolutely be using iNaturalist.

Olivia: These logbooks are a part of a long legacy of natural history records in the land that would become Acadia National Park, including Wabanaki knowledge and the work of naturalists and scientists. While researching for another story on Acadia’s rich scientific history, Catherine found the Champlain Society’s records in the collections of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society. Catherine: As soon as I saw all of their lists of species and their measurements of the island and their surveys of the shoreline, I knew immediately that there were scientists out there who would be interested in this information. As part of Landscape of Change, we had a lot of work to do to make the data usable. We had to di