By Howard Williams

This essay describes changes in the way nature may be observed and recorded, especially in light of recently-developed naturalist platforms, and discusses issues relating to how we monitor the natural environment.

In the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau, not a scientist, made detailed observations of the timing of the natural environment around Walden Pond (USA).  At about the same time, numerous citizen scientists, mostly clerics and schoolteachers, assisted Charles Darwin by providing him and other professional naturalists with a wealth of observations. 

Just over twenty years ago, Carole Donaldson and I were invited to provide a preliminary data analysis of one of the first large-scale ‘citizen science’ projects in Canada, the early 20th century ‘MacKay’ project in Nova Scotia.

THEN

Towards the end of the 19th century, Dr. A.H. MacKay, superintendent of education in Nova Scotia, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3skjvPpuMg) initiated a project whereby both primary and secondary schoolchildren, and their teachers, collected natural history data.  The MacKay data represent a baseline of natural history (phenology) data for the period 1895 to 1923 and are contained in beautifully handwritten ledgers only preserved for modern researchers through serendipity.  Some of the ledgers never made it into the 21st century and are assumed to be lost. (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/alexander-mackay-climate-change-children-science-1.5063352).  Some of the early results of these phenological observations in the 1895 to 1923 period are published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada and in the Transactions of the Nova Scotian Institute of Science (e.g. MacKay 1896) and in the Journal of Education.  By way of example of how the data can be used, a contour map of the 1923 Rhodora flowering data is shown, the legend is flowering commencement in days.  My limited photographic data indicate that Rhodora flowering is some ten days earlier now, as early as mid-May.

During the MacKay project, a total of 1469 schools in the province were registered as centres of observation, providing good coverage of the Province; note that there are only 370 schools in Nova Scotia in 2022, giving you an indication of the change in school density.  216 different types of observations were made, largely when children were walking the less than 5 km to and from school and during class-time – those were the days when children grew up at an early age and many had to be tough.

MacKay recognised that phenological variation within Nova Scotia could be ascribed to a combination of: location within a large land mass with a quite variable climate; altitude and exposure; subjected to highly variable local and regional weather patterns.  As a consequence, he subdivided collection of the data into discrete ‘belts’ within school districts.  Each belt was a geomorphic unit: coastal, lowland, or highland.  School districts are generally comparable with groups of counties within a relatively small region of the province, such as Yarmouth, Digby & Shelburne.  The combination of belts and districts allowed for subdivision of the collected data into small units that he expected to have a modicum of climatic and ecological homogeneity.

In 2001 I conducted a preliminary analysis of the MacKay data for Environment Canada to support an initiative that came to be known as the ‘1000 Eyes project’, whereby modern schoolchildren would be encouraged to provide monitoring data on-line.  The idea was to see whether there were differences in the timing of natural events between those monitored in the early 1900s and those of the early 2000s.  Carole provided easy-to-read explanations of what to record and how for the new website.  My analysis indicated that there were year to year differences in the approximately 20 years of MacKay data but these were insufficient to indicate a long-term trend, given the standard deviation of the data.  To my knowledge, these baseline data have never been incorporated as a whole into any data repository and analysed.  Whilst this project never really got going, it was superseded in 2008 by the on-line platform: iNaturalist that has had much success in encouraging people to submit data.

Concluding this section on historical data, a 2019 numerical analysis of some of the MacKay data may be found at: https://ojs.library.dal.ca/nsis/article/download/nsis50-1culbertson-paoli%2Cfarro%2Clong%2Cwilkinson/7655 .  Figure 5 from that study, relating to Mayflower (Epigaea repens) first flower appearance in 1901, is shown here on the left.  Numbered contours show the spatial distribution of days from the beginning of the year.  Clearly, southwest Nova Scotia warms up from winter more quickly than the rest of the province.

NOW

Observing the timing of natural phenomena, phenology, has become significant to the study of climate change.  Some recent literature on phenology and its application to climate change can be found at: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2745.13926 and https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220706153105.htm. 

Over the last decade or so I have used three naturalist platforms (apps): iNaturalist, eBird and Merlin.  eBird and Merlin are maintained by Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, iNaturalist in Canada is maintained by a number of organisations, including the Canadian Wildlife Federation in association with the Royal Ontario Museum, Parks Canada and Nature Serve Canada).  All three platforms are world-wide in scope.

In an effort to produce presentable photographs for uploading to eBird and iNaturalist I prefer to use a camera rather than a phone; I then upload my observations from my desktop.  Whereas the platforms eBird and Merlin (to identify birds by song) are only for birds, the iNaturalist platform is for anything that moves or grows, or has been constructed by an organism (e.g. nest, burrow, faeces).  Making observations is straightforward for those that are even slightly computer-literate, either with smartphone or camera and a notebook.  On uploading an image, iNaturalist may automatically suggest a likely species or genus for the organism you have observed, or you can manually enter the name if you want to guide it.  For eBird, you need to enter the names of birds observed, along with any photographs or ‘Merlin’ sound recordings that you may have taken for confirmation.  Easy-peasy, what could go wrong?

Looking at natural phenomena using these three platforms can almost become addictive.  They can encourage looking for natural phenomena, so in that sense, the addiction can be positive – data collection and education.  Each Spring, birders sometimes have to reacquaint themselves with the songs of some birds because so much of birding is undertaken by ear.  With regard to birder experience and qualification, the eBird platform is very trusting, though they use a team of experts that filter likely errors and sometimes contact you for additional data.  eBird encourages additional documentation in the form of photos and audio to confirm your observations.  The negative aspects of mis-identification are managed though not eliminated.

I am still impressed at the results of AI photo recognition in iNaturalist.  Within seconds of submitting a photograph, several suggestions may pop up, each with a range of photos for comparison.  One can then choose which genus or species you think is the correct one.  Thankfully, it appears that iNaturalist does not fully trust your identification because, in time, an expert, somewhere in the world, will confirm your entries.  It is remarkable how quickly one can accumulate a large list of organisms encountered.  You can compare your list of observations accumulated over time with those from other observers.  So, what’s the problem?

During City Challenges, bio-blitzes, or even during day to day observations people can get motivated to undertake many observations of current biodiversity and how it and the environment in general might be changing – this was the rationale of these platforms.  However, I find it is too easy to become obsessed with finding more species because both eBird and iNaturalist display your monthly and, or yearly results to encourage you to further effort.  One can become addicted, even competitive – shock-horror.  Observers can also check to see how many species their peers have recorded.  This might encourage me to go out again and see if I could not increase my species count to move up the ladder of the number of species observed.  The problem is this: one can become fixated by species number at the cost of enjoying wandering through fields and woods.  One can become so focused on finding new species to photograph that the experience of organisms, fields and forest as a whole ecosystem can be lost.

We learnt, especially during Covid19, that one good reason for being outside is to be present in Nature, to be ‘mindful’ of one’s surroundings.  Whether by smartphone or camera, one intrinsically becomes an outside observer: seeing individual species but not sensing the whole ecosystem.  This issue has been highlighted by Soren Bondrup-Nielsen, an ecologist and friend from Acadia University.

Paraphrasing some of Soren’s writings it is clear that observers using platforms are likely to focus on only parts of a system rather than the whole system, typical behaviour in Western society but much less so in indigenous cultures, as a result of unconsciously living within the mechanical world view.  Whilst the adoption of this world view has allowed us to manipulate nature for our exclusive benefit, we have come to see nature as composed of entities or parts and thus tend to see the world as composed of resources for us to exploit.

Furthermore, Soren continues: “The mechanistic world view is reflected in our language. Western languages, indeed English, are noun-based.  In English, we see the world as composed of parts and have names for those parts.  Natural objects and structures are brought into existence by naming them.  In contrast, languages of indigenous peoples reflect the environment within which they live, and their relationship with the world around them.  Indigenous languages tend to be verb-based- and thus reflect action within the environment.  For example, in English, we have the verb to walk.  No matter where you are walking, it is just that you walk.  In some Indigenous languages, there are many words for walking, depending on where or how you walk.  So there are different words for walking through a forest, up a hill, or across a field and so on.  So a single word can be composed of different parts of the environment, and thus, it is natural for indigenous peoples to see the world as an interconnected whole.  Therefore, language is a reflection of how we see ourselves.  We give everything names. Often, all we know about something is its name; what more do we need to know?”  

Soren has taken people on field trips to talk about forest ecology, where someone will ask the name of various plants and fungi they see, or birds they hear singing.  If he knows the species, he tells them the name, and they are satisfied.  He could make up any name, and some people would be content, but isn’t that the irony?  The name means nothing without knowing something about the species – what is its habitat, how does it reproduce, what does it eat, what is its behaviour, how does it interact with other species where it lives, and much more.  If one knows that about a species, then what does it matter how it is named other than to facilitate communication?

I, too, have been obsessed (Carole, my wife would say I still am) with the sometimes competitive nature of the naturalist platforms and have nearly come out the other side as a recovering but continuing on-line platform-user.  On both eBird and iNaturalist I describe myself as a ‘retired and recovering geoscientist’.  I did so because I realised that during my career as a structural geologist and then as a groundwater hydrologist I had lost track of the animate part of the environment, concentrating first on ancient rocks, and secondly, on water.  Over all the years I spent outside in the field, in places as far apart as the United Kingdom, Sierra Leone, New Zealand, East & West Greenland and Northern Ontario, I can remember appreciating non-geological phenomena only rarely, despite having the advantages of knowledgeable field assistants who clearly knew more about the environment than did I.  It seems that it has been only since I retired that I have had the time and motivation to look at the rest of the environment around me – how sad is that?

Both eBird and iNaturalist platforms are an excellent source of photographic, location and timing (phenological) data for scientists and environmental organisations to learn about what is happening to species, populations and diversity, and where.  We need these platforms, largely populated with data from amateurs (citizen scientists); recall that for effective conservation you cannot manage what you don’t measure.

Is photography the best tool to use for identification?  As a geology student, we were taught to draw rocks, fossils and outcrops rather than, or as well as photographing them because the act of drawing requires a more detailed examination of the object – relatively insignificant details, lost in rapid photography, can become apparent, aiding the identification process.  As a geology professional I continued to draw complex relationships as well as photograph them.  Nowadays, I would make fewer identification errors if I spent more time on details rather than just making a quick set of snaps that these naturalist platforms encourage.

People look at or wish to experience nature for different reasons.  Some may be interested in ecology, like Soren; some may marvel at its beauty and want to capture it, such as the many bird watchers and photographers and artists.  Yet others may enter the natural environment for exercising the body and the mind.  Children, too, are highly susceptible to wonder at nature and learn from it.  The educational and enjoyment advantages of going out to look at and feel nature, even during a sometimes phrenetic Bioblitz are so much better than merely looking at a book, or worse, trying to look at a screen in the sunshine.

Conservation issues usually relate to so-called ‘native’ plants and animals.  I use commas around native because many species in Ontario are introduced by humans or self-introduced after the last Ice Age some 15 000 years ago and, as a result are not truly native in a geological time frame.  It is all a question of the time frame you choose.  Over geological time frames, species migrate, including humanoids.  In contrast, biologists and conservationists tend to look at much shorter time scales, not much more than decades.  iNaturalist indicates whether an organism is native to an area, or introduced by anthropogenic means.  Is this important, and if so, why?

There are many common and introduced plants and animals in Ontario, are they important too?  I believe that common species are also significant to conservationists and ecologists.  In Great Britain, for example, the House Sparrow has suffered a recent rapid decline, it was once an incredibly successful city bird, (https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/house-sparrow/population-trends/).  The important aspect of this issue is that common, not-necessarily native organisms also respond to climate and environment variables such as habitat.  Monitoring introduced ‘weeds’ may be just as important if the questions you are asking are about the health of the environment.  As Carl Linnaeus said: “Omnia mirari etiam tritissima” (Find wonder in everything, even the most commonplace). As Sir David Attenborough said recently: No one will protect what they do not first care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced.  Monitoring the environment by observing plants and birds is important