What happened
A lovely lady called Sydney came to our festival this year and immediately fell in love with Sowena’s land. She’s an iNaturalist ambassador which, it turns out, means someone who loves the natural world enough to give up their own time helping other people notice it.
She came to Sowena and set up a nature project for our land. She walked the whole site with camera in hand photographing things I have never once stopped to look at. When I saw what she had curated on the iNaturalist page, I was actually quite emotional. Forty years my family has held the land, but nobody has ever counted or recorded what lives here and I was really moved by it.
What iNaturalist actually is
It’s a free app, and it’s simpler than it sounds. You photograph something living like A bee, flower, beetle on a gatepost. You upload the photo, and the app has a first go at identifying it and then real naturalists, all over the world, look at your picture and confirm or correct it. Once two or more people agree on what something is, the record becomes what’s called “research grade” and joins a global biodiversity database that scientists genuinely use. Your photograph of a bee on a bramble becomes a small piece of real data about what is living where, and when.
Sydney has drawn a boundary around our land. Which means anything anyone photographs at Sowena automatically joins our project. You don’t have to tag it, submit it, or do anything at all beyond uploading it. So over time this builds into a year round picture of what actually lives here. What appears in March. What’s still holding on in January storms and what is going on in the hedgerow while we’re all inside doing yoga. You do not need to be able to identify anything. You do not need to know a hoverfly from a bee, or have any idea what that yellow thing in the grass is. Photographing something you can’t name is the single most useful thing you can do, because someone else will name it for you.
Why this sits so well with what Sowena is
Nature is at the centre of everything we are. Not always just as scenery, but as the actual thing that does the work.
This project makes that really visible AND it’s free (which we always love!). Anyone can take part, including children. It gives something back to the land and to a genuine body of scientific knowledge which is SUPER COOL! We are geeking out over this big time.
How to join in
– Download the iNaturalist app (free, iPhone or Android)
– Make an account with an email address
Next time you’re at Sowena for yoga, a retreat, the festival or a walk down to the cabin … photograph something small and upload it.
You can see what’s on there already here.
Do have a look and geek out with us on how cool this is!
HUGE thanks to Sydney who is also planning some BioBlitz days which will be community days centred around walking the land and identifying things at different points of the year!
