Mississippi Natural Heritage Program's Journal

Hi everybody!

We have decided to change our project type from Traditional to Collective. I originally wanted to keep it as "Traditional" because it gives you more control on who, what, and how the data gets collected, but it was also more complicated for the average user to contribute any observations. The "Collective" project type also wouldn't let you easily import a list of species you only want to focus on like in the "Traditional" project (at least not that I could find), and I didn't want to manually type in over 1400+ species names into the Taxa field in the edit project menu. Well, we decided to bite the bullet and manually input in the 1400+ tracked species names into the "Include Taxa" field.

With this being said, I noticed during the manual input process, that every time I would save my progress, it would notify me that because I'm updating the project, it would notify the users of our changes, and it has sent me multiple emails every time I saved my progress. So I would like to apologize in advance for the spam notifications you're probably getting every time we continue to update the iNat list of species for the project. Hopefully we'll be done with this process by the end of the week.

TLDR: Sorry for the notifications spam as we add / update our tracked species to the Taxa List on iNat.

Thanks,

Quentin Fairchild

Hi everybody!

Due to the amount of emails, messages, phone calls, etc. about sighting reports of various species, I decided the best way to handle the volume is to start using iNaturalist. The advantage of using iNaturalist is that it simplifies how one can submit their observations to us, uses both machine learning and the local community to help identify specimens, organizes much of the data automatically on our end, and it can be used as an educational tool that allows people to identify / learn about their natural surroundings.

We ask that when you join our project group, that you go into your settings on the project page (under "Your Membership" that is to the right of the interactive map on Desktop)(see comments below), and select
"trust this project with hidden/exact coordinates". Many species that are listed as threaten or endangered will automatically get obscured. While this gives a fairly general and vague locality, we often need an exact location to get a better idea for the type of habitat they are observed in.

Thank you all for joining and helping the Mississippi Natural Heritage Program with its mission!

*Edited - Added details