I am using both platforms for butterflies this summer, in the absence of organized field trips. Being on the edge of Pugetopolis I have plenty of places to go in the great outdoors where there won’t be crowds, so long as I don’t go anywhere popular.

I’m using David Jenning’s County Big Day Challenge as an excuse to explore, but avoiding the Cascades altogether this weird summer-too many people from the big cities with nothing else to do wandering around everywhere. I’ve seen the videos of parking at Tipsoo Lake. The Olympics, however, are a different story, and near home, though not known for good butterflying, with reason. I told David Jennings that I would win the June challenge for Jefferson county with a single butterfly, a Margined White, and I did.

E-Butterfly is very similar to eBird-if you’ve used that, you can figure out e-Butterfly pretty well. Two big differences: there are no public Hot Spots, you have to make and name all your own locations; and there’s no local check- list to scroll through, you enter the butterfly name in a text box on the right and it pulls up what’s available for your area. Once you pull that up and enter a number in the box on the left of the species name, then more data fields show up and a photo upload link.

Photos are not required but they do help verify that you know what you’re talking about. The Data Usage box lets you control how public your information will be. I’ve only had 2 observations out of 60 verified so far, one without a photo-don’t know how that works, except that it’s a common species in the right place at the right time. Observations are verified by e-Butterfly’s group of regional experts, not just anyone. If you feel that you are a regional expert, you can apply to be included. E-Butterfly asks for metadata about your survey, like eBird does-date, time, duration, distance covered, survey effort. You also check a box to state whether you recorded every butterfly you identified or not; this allows researchers using the data to infer abundance, phenology, or absence of species. If you didn’t skip anything, then any species you don’t include might not occur there at that time. If you did skip species, because you object to Cabbage Whites for instance, or you listed some species in that location earlier, then no inferences can be made from your survey about absence, abundance or phenology.

iNaturalist is commonly used by citizen science groups and school groups for bioblitz surveys, but it’s not specific to butterflies (covers all biota) and it doesn’t ask for metadata about your survey like numbers of individuals or sur- vey effort or completeness. And, iNaturalist is photo driven. Yes you can post an observation without a photo, but there isn’t much point to that. Identifications are vetted by any other iNat user; it’s crowd-sourced rather than a closed group of selected experts. You can be part of that crowd. Also iNat has AI soft- ware that allows it to attempt to give you an identification from your photo and location. So it can be helpful if you’re not sure what something is-post the photo and see if iNat has suggestions! I’ve found that iNat’s AI is pretty good with wildflowers, reptiles and birds, helpful but not foolproof with butterflies, and dismal with non-gilled mushrooms. It all depends on what people post, and apparently most people post wild- flowers and reptiles. Though there is a very active group of Washingtonians, mostly in the Pullman area, posting observations of little brown or gray moths.

WBA has “projects” on both platforms. When creating an observation in e-Butterfly, there’s a drop-down list under Time and Party Size for projects, where you choose WBA. On iNat, you first have to join the WA State Butterflies project from the Community-Projects tab. Then, all your qualifying observations will be automatically included (Lepidoptera, in WA OR ID BC, 2020). You can look at the Project page any time to see what others have posted, and any iNat user can look here too and help with identifications. There’s observations of moths and caterpillars and butterflies that need second and third opinions, and some have no ID at all beyond Lepidoptera. You could help! Every observation has to be seconded by someone other than the original poster, even obvious ones like Cabbage White. I find that e-Butterfly is good when you make a determined effort to see, identify and count butterflies, while iNat is good for casual sightings, help IDing something, or just to show off a good photo or unusual sighting. You can, and I have, put the same butterfly on both platforms. Also iNat does moths, and everything living, where e-Butterfly only does butterflies. iNat works on both a web browser and on smart phones, so you could post sightings right in the field. E- Butterfly only works on a web browser at this time. Both platforms allow you to search observations by location, but both use Google Maps, and Google doesn’t seem to know that there’s a state called Washington. Type in “WA, USA” exactly; it will not appear in the drop down list of place names. “Washington” is just a county in different states.

Both platforms are used as a data source by researchers. If you see “RG” on an iNat observation, that means it’s Research Grade-it has date and location data, and the identification has been verified from a photo. Not everything on iNat is RG. On e-Butterfly it’s a little orange “Verified” label. Both platforms also automatically obscure the location of threatened or endangered species and give you some control over how much location info to make public. Researchers have the option of contacting you through the website to ask for more precise location info.

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