Benefits of reporting
Hello mammalwatchers!
As an outcome of the Mammalwatching community meetings in Spain and online, some of us have been preparing some materials that should help you to write a trip report and report your sightings!
The “Reporting” guides you through reporting your sightings: Why, where, and what is most beneficial to report for the conservation of the species we love so much! There is also a section with benefits for yourself such as armchair ticking and how to receive identification help. Also here, you can find a new video on the mammalwatching channel outlining the topic: https://youtu.be/_EY3LlOcTe0
With all these topics, if you have feedback, think something is missing or have another tip, get in touch with us at info@projectfelis.org or our website!
Best regards,
Valentin with Felis, Jon, Lars, Mandy, Janco and Kelly
Reporting_2023
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2 Comments
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vmoser
thanks for the information! Mammal map is also on iNaturalist I believe, so that might be the easiest way for people that would like to contribute to the project while visiting the region: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mammalmap
Small mammal photography: As far as I know, nothing is planned for the moment, but this would be great to discuss at the next community meeting (sometime in the second half of 2023)!
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vnsankar
Great post! This is a topic that I care a lot about, particularly considering the fact that I use these observation repositories a lot for planning trips & learning species ID. Once in a while you find some REALLY good records on there. A few comments I can think of:
– International observation databases: In addition to US & Canada, iNaturalist is pretty heavily used in Mexico but seemingly less so elsewhere in Latin America. For Brazil you have BioFaces and Argentina EcoRegistros but these aren’t set up as well or easily searchable, and I don’t think they have a good system for ID validation nor do they transfer data to GBIF… In Sub-Saharan Africa there is Virtual Museum which has the MammalMap (https://vmus.adu.org.za/). Pretty heavy focus on South Africa though with few records from elsewhere on the continent. There’s actually a lot of good data there and it has expert validation & data sharing with GBIF, but unfortunately this is somewhat problematic as many of the ‘experts’ validating rodent & bat IDs in particular don’t really seem to know the species they’re talking about.
– Small mammal photography: I think this might be in the pipeline anyway but I was chatting with a few people about this recently so thought I’d mention it here. While there aren’t that many serious rodent/bat enthusiasts who explicitly target these species on trips, a lot of people do enjoy watching them more casually and photograph what they see on trips. Which is wonderful for these mammals and their conservation! Unfortunately, a lot of these photos end up not being very useful for ID purposes but this can be fixed with a bit of knowledge. Given how good digital cameras are now, you can ID a lot of stuff just from in situ photos, without being in the hand – but you need the right characters in the shots. I think it would be good to write up guides indicating the best features to include for bats (e.g. tragus, feet, noseleaf from multiple angles – side for Rhinolophus, front for some other genera) and rodents (e.g. tail, tops and/or bottoms of feet, ears, lateral line if present etc.). Like simple ‘How to Photograph Bats & Rodents.’