LEARN ABOUT CREATURES

If you love photography, and have amassed hundreds of photographs of beautiful and cool plants and animals...how do you make sense of what you've seen.

A lot of us get to go out taking pictures on special occasions. It might be a trip to a nature preserve, a field school, or a monthly bird walk. Taking pictures might be a memory aid that we would like to learn more about what we have seen. We would like to show our friends all the cool stuff that exists in nature. We want to remind ourselves and our friends that beautiful places exist. (Oh, and some people get really competitive with their collections of photographs.)

So how can you put your photography collection in some sort of order, which will actually help you understand what you've seen.

In this activity, we will have you start the process of taxa-tagging your photo collection using Flickr. Get your photo collection into Flickr, and then continue on...

[note: This is not the only way to organize your photos. But for the sake of learning, we show you hear how to make your photography collection compatible with science. We assume you are a casual nature photographer without much background in biology.]

Figuring out species

Say you went on a tour of plants. The guide introduced you to a bunch of common names for plants you've never seen before. You've also heard some latin names and then quickly forgotten them. How could you possibly remember latin???!

The first thing to check is whether or not the place you visited has a species list. Oftentimes, a nature preserve has already had someone compile this list of creatures that frequent their location. Chances that you saw something rare on the site aren't good if you're a beginner. We tend to notice all the common stuff first. So look up wherever you went on the internet, check with the park service. There's a number of different ways to find species lists.

Then open up your photo collection, and pick something that you learned the common name for already. For example, you heard that a certain plant is called a "lead plant." Go find your picture, and you can write that name in the title, description or tags.

In Flickr, you can tag it with the common name like this: taxonomy:common="Lead plant". You can then consult your plant list or google 'lead plant' and try to find some close matches and Genus/species information for that plant.

What if I don't know the common name??

So if you don't have a common name already, there's some hope still...depending on how good your picture is and how many pictures of the same creature you already have.

There are already Flickr groups that can help this. We will compile a list of these different kinds of groups here. One of the active ID groups is "ID please"

Also, there are existing websites for different organisms -- plants, mushrooms, insects and more bugs -- which also support you in figuring out what's what.

A project based in the UC Berkeley School of Informatics is iNaturalist.org. This is another biology community site for beginners that's designed for making identifications. We differ from iNaturalist in that we are about creating meaning, stories, and action about that natural world. Identification is an important part of the story-telling process.

We plan to start building up some activities where we will work with you to help you learn to identify plants and animals. You'll have assignments to help out some of these other websites. We're working out the details this fall, and hope to pilot this in the winter 2009.

If you want to participate in this, send us a message. Let us know if you are particularly interested in birds, mushrooms, plants, bugs, or something else.