iNaturalist Workshop with Murray Fisher

In 2019 Murray Fisher, founder of the New York Harbor School and Billion Oyster Project, launched an effort to observe, identify and catalog every species of organism on Fishers Island. The project utilizes the iNaturalist platform and app to build a Fishers Island biodiversity database from crowd-sourced photographs of all our living organisms. This is where your help is essential.

Join Murray Tuesday, August 17, for a workshop about how and why biodiversity matters on Fishers Island, and about how you can help this exciting project by recording and sharing your observations on the iNaturalist Fishers Island Biodiversity Project webpage via the iNaturalist app.

Please bring your camera or iPhone to the workshop.

Fishers Island, iNaturalist

Fishers Island is undoubtedly a place of great natural beauty—on our beaches, in our marshes, woodlands, grasslands, and even our own backyards. But what range of species live here? We can fairly easily observe the wide variety of plants, birds and mammals with which we share our island, but most people miss the smaller things. Luckily, a remarkable platform named iNaturalist has been developed to help users identify any living organism. It is brilliantly simple to use. Users upload a photograph (from their phone or computer) and the platform’s image recognition software will guess an identity for it. Then that “observation” is automatically shared with nearly two million users, including specialists, who can help confirm the identity of the species. iNaturalist allows users to not only identify any living organism, but to keep a catalog of everything the user has seen. It also facilitates the creation of projects like “Fishers Island Biodiversity” that group observations based on time and geographic parameters.

This gallery is a small sampling of the many Fishers Island iNaturalist observations that have reached Research Grade status, meaning that they are shared with the Global Biodiversity Database and can be used by scientists and policy makers when regulating and managing species. More are on display in the museum as part of our Annual Exhibition and on this website.

The following observers have photographs on display: Jane T. Ahrens, Kit Briggs, Marnie Briggs, Tracy Brock, Benjamin de Menil, Jamie Doucette, Murray Fisher, gerardwayscatmitch, Stephanie Hall, Michele Klimczak, Frank Laskowski, lydbug14, Sara Maysles, Foster McBride, Terry McNamara, Dr. Adam B. Mitchell, Mary P. Murphy, Linda Musser, Kristen Peterson, Phoebe Polk, Alex Pollack, Pierce Rafferty, Laird Reed, Alexa Rosenberg, Jack Schneider, and Harry Yerkes.

We thank each and everyone of you!

Please go to iNaturalist.com to see thousands more observations of the flora and fauna of Fishers Island by simply searching for our location.