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The City of Charlottetown and Nature P.E.I. are hosting a month-long “BioBlitz” to celebrate and document local biodiversity.<\/p>\n
The initiative invites residents to submit photos and audio recordings of plants, animals, fungi, and insects to iNaturalist, a community science app. The platform helps users learn about the environment around them while building a database for scientists, researchers and conservation groups.<\/p>\n
“We encourage folks to get outside \u2014 it could be in your own yard, in public parks, around the city \u2014 and document whatever wild plants, insects, animals you see,” said Rowan Neale, a nature education and restoration co-ordinator with the City of Charlottetown.<\/p>\n
To participate, residents simply photograph nature and upload the images to the app, where the submissions are cataloged and identified. <\/p>\n
“You don’t need to be an expert in nature,” Neale said. “You don’t need experience. All you need is to be curious and to just get out there.”<\/p>\n
The resulting database supports both local and international conservation efforts.<\/p>\n
For instance, the P.E.I. Invasive Species Council uses the app to track non-native species on the Island, while the City of Charlottetown uses the information to schedule its nature repair projects.<\/p>\n
However, the impact of these observations extends well beyond P.E.I.<\/p>\n
“This is a global app, and so there’s plenty of different conservation organizations that use this data,” Neale said, adding the information helps track global pollinator health and the seasonal migration patterns of birds.<\/p>\n
“The more we know, the more we can take strategic action to actually help these species and ecosystems.”<\/p>\n
While the official BioBlitz runs for the next month, the iNaturalist app can be used to log observations year-round. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 2 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":812653,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-812652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/812653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}