WBA has a new iNaturalist project. You won’t have to join the project to be included – any observation of any butterfly (and some moths) in WA state will be automatically included in the project. So – what? You might be asking.

Well, what this does, is it allows you or anyone else interested in butterflies to see what’s being observed, where and when; and to verify or change identifications as able. But wait there’s more! All these observations, with their identifications and every change ever made, will be available to scientists to help them figure out where things live and when they appear. Julie Combs, the invertebrate conservation biologist at WDFW, told us at our last meeting that we just don’t have enough data about even the common butterflies, let alone the 21 Species of Greatest Conservation Needs (https://wdfw.wa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/01742/14_A5_Invertebrates.pdf). This iNaturalist project will be an easy way for you to contribute to our knowledge of butterfly distribution!

It’s pretty easy to post observations. Upload a photo, hopefully with a date and GPS stamp, which iNat will read automatically. If your camera doesn’t have GPS capability, you can add the location manually. Then either you let iNat suggest what species it thinks your photo is showing, or you tell it from a dropdown list of possibilities. You will be limited to their nomenclature but they use Jon Pelham’s Catalog or butterflies so that should be fine. You can add notes, and as many photos as you need.

https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/getting+started .

If you feel like you can verify other people’s identifications, then add this project to your Community so you can easily browse the posts. Just search for Washington State Butterflies under the Community – Projects tab (NOT Butterflies of the Washington Area – that’s the wrong Washington), click About, and Join. Now it will be in your Community tab whenever you sign in to iNaturalist. But be careful about verifying or disagreeing with identifications. Not every observation will have the information needed to identify it to species. And unless you’re Bob Pyle or Caitlin LaBar, there will be posts identified as a species that you are not familiar with. In those cases, just leave the observation alone (except in the case of bad photos, you can post a comment to that effect). Don’t be the person who says to himself, “Oh I don’t know what a Western Tiger Swallowtail is; all I know is it’s a butterfly so I’m going to Disagree with the identification of Western Tiger and say it’s Lepidoptera.” Don’t do that. People will hate you, and not unjustified. Second, don’t just Agree with observations unless you can actually tell that that’s what it is. Get out a field guide if necessary. And don’t assume that iNaturalist is right when it suggests an identification. iNaturalist only knows what total strangers have told it, and some of them just Agree with anything.

Which brings us to another big benefit of this project: We’ll be correcting iNaturalist’s incorrect identifications and improving its butterfly-identifying algorithm!

G’num2024Vol25No2