Thanks to everyone who has joined our project so far! We are really enjoying seeing your observations.

If you need a bit of help getting started, or just want to improve your skills, take a look at the growing list of resources available on our website. We have just started a series of videos where Bush Blitz Field Manager Dr Kate will learn useful techniques from our experts.

In the first video, Dr Jodi Rowley, a frog biologist from the Australian Museum and University of New South Wales, gives Dr Kate tips on how to find and identify the frogs in her local pond. FrogID is a great app for identifying frog calls and data collected goes into the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA). If you use FrogID, there is no need to add your frog calls to our project - in fact, this could create duplicate records in ALA. Your frog images are most welcome, of course, and Jodi will be on hand to ID them!

Thank you to our project curators who are helping to ID your observations - particularly those new to iNaturalist who are having to spend a bit more time figuring out how it all works! These are the same experts who come on our expeditions, plus some of their colleagues. Click on their profiles to read more about their areas of expertise.

We will also be introducing our project curators on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and first in the spotlight is @simongrove, Senior Curator at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. He took part in our expeditions to the Tarkine, Five Rivers Reserve and Flinders Island and he would love to see more Tasmanian observations!

We were pretty excited to reach 100 members on our project this week. We asked our 100th member @thesciencerobin to tell us a bit about herself and why she joined the project:

My name is Isabella Robinson though I'm probably better known as the Science Robin on social media. I'm a science communicator and biology student at Macquarie University. I work at CSIRO in the Australian National Insect Collection and the Australian National Herbarium and heard about Bush Blitz through their partnership with CSIRO and the ALA. My favourite groups are asilids or assassin flies. They're large, charismatic flies with a lot of personality. Taxonomy is the cornerstone of so much of biology. Getting involved with Bush Blitz is a great way of contributing to our knowledge and understanding of Australian species, while learning more about the biodiversity in our own backyards.

Thanks for sharing @thesciencerobin! We’re looking forward to (virtually) meeting more of you. If you haven’t already, you can share information about yourself by updating your profile - if you’re not comfortable sharing a photo of yourself, you can use your favourite observation.

Small insects and spiders can be very difficult to spot while they rest or feed on vegetation. One technique used by the experts is beating the vegetation to make them fall out. You can try this at home - our latest videos show you how to make your own aspirator or 'pooter' and how to collect ‘minibeasts’. Give it a try and then return anything you find to the spot where you found it.

How to make an aspirator or ‘pooter’
How to catch ‘mini-beasts’

These and other useful resources are available on our website. If you have a suggestion for a future video or fact sheet, or a tip you’d like to share, please let us know.