Calling all citizens to participate in Great Southern Bioblitz competition

GEORGE NEWS - As part of enhancing biodiversity awareness, George Mayor Leon van Wyk encourages the citizens of George and the Garden Route to participate in the Great Southern Bioblitz (GSB) competition that will run between 28 and 31 October.

According to Christine Ridge-Schnaufer of the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa (Wessa) Eden, the GSB is "an international period of intense biological surveying to record all the living species within several designated areas across the Southern Hemisphere in spring".

She says the GSB aims not only to highlight the immense biodiversity across the Southern Hemisphere in the flourishing springtime, but also to engage the public in science and nature learning, using the citizen science platform iNaturalist.

"The Garden Route has participated in the international City Nature Challenge (CNC) and GSB since 2020 and has been among the leaders for biodiversity each time - not really surprising."

To mark the end of Tourism Month (September), Van Wyk visited the Garden Route Botanical Garden in George on 27 September, as one of the tourism attractions in George. Corné Brink of the Garden Route Botanical Garden gave Van Wyk the tour.

Van Wyk encouraged everybody living in the Garden Route to take photos of all natural living things and post them on the iNaturalist website.

"It is important to know how many wild animals and plants can be found in the area. Are there any threatened species? It is all about conservation, sustainability, community involvement, making a difference, thinking global and acting global, and of course just wanting to be out in the veld too!" he said.

How to participate

Photos or observations can be taken using a cellphone or camera (with GPS data) and, after registering on iNaturalist www.inaturalist.org, must be uploaded onto the website.

Online tutorials are available and answers to any questions can also be found online.

The artificial intelligence of iNaturalist helps with identifications. It is not infallible, but hundreds of experts internationally (such as Sanbi) use iNaturalist to search for new observations of their specialist field and fine-tune observations made by citizen scientists (you and I!) – depending on the quality of the photos.

Using iNaturalist is free of charge.

As individuals become more familiar with the functions of iNaturalist, more and more nodes of information can be found, studied and extracted.