The project of the Alpi Cozie Parks on iNaturalist surpasses 100 thousand.

The project created by the Protected Areas of the Cozie Alps on the website iNaturalist celebrates 100 thousand reports. This is an initiative created in 2017 on the prestigious American web portal to collect and archive naturalistic observations gathered by specialists or simple enthusiasts according to the principles of citizen science or participatory science.

Simplifying, we can define iNaturalist as an ecological social network where everyone can upload georeferenced images of naturalistic observations that are made available to the entire user community for validation and subsequent documentation. Within it, a project has been created to share contributions collected within the Parks, Nature Reserves, and sites of the Natura 2000 Network managed by the management authority of the protected areas of the Cozie Alps thanks to the efforts of Luca Maurino, an official from the Biodiversity Area of the Park Authority.

“The idea to focus on this platform – says Maurino – arose more than 10 years ago, when the iNaturalist site certainly did not enjoy the wide reach it has today: it had recently become a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Foundation. From the perspective of the Park Authority, we identified its enormous potential in bringing the academic and official scientific world closer to a large pool of amateur scholars and simple ecology enthusiasts. The result of over 100 thousand collected reports has greatly exceeded our expectations. But what is more interesting is the quality of the observations that have allowed us to catalog and geolocate rare or endangered species belonging to fauna and flora. Not to mention the great merit of involving staff from the Authority and visitors from our territories in an exciting effort to collect reports that are then subjected to a subsequent scientific validation process peer to peer which, in the case of the Protected Areas project of the Cozie Alps, has already involved nearly 4000 identifiers.”

The invitation, therefore, is to continue contributing to the following link to provide, with the help of new technologies, an increasingly updated and complete overview of the species present in the Parks of the Cozie Alps.