About Me
I developed an interest in biodiversity and life on Earth in 2018 when I was unable to answer questions my children raised about the natural world. In building my knowledge base, I spend what limited free time I have reading nature guides, journal articles and research papers. Anything that’ll help me understand how the natural world fits together.
Utilising the citizen science biodiversity recording platform iNaturalist, and from hundreds of nature hikes, I’ve built a collection of more than 33,000 records of encounters with various species, and supplemented my knowledge by communicating and collaborating with like minded citizen scientists.
I spend time sharing this knowledge with the broader community by providing species identifications through iNaturalist for taxa for which I have garnered a sufficient understanding of local biodiversity. In addition to more than 36,000 identifications, I share tidbits of fascinating information and provide links to more in-depth resources.
Turning this knowledge into practical application, I modified my suburban property with the aim of maximising its biodiversity. I recorded over 775 species on the property and uploaded over 6,200 records to iNaturalist before I moved on to a new location in 2025. I used the new information I uncovered to build urban biodiversity, literally, from the ground up.
In 2019 I established the ‘South Australian iNaturalists’ project to bring together local nature enthusiasts and encourage the wider community to take part in Citizen Science.
I built the ‘Protected Parks of South Australia’ iNaturalist project in 2019, which brings together biodiversity records from more than 450 publicly accessible protected natural areas across South Australia
In 2023 I began building a social enterprise in South Australia that specialises in building community biodiversity literacy. In spring 2024 I launched Foundation Ecology and provided bioblitz workshops direct to landowners, empowering them to become citizen scientists and champions of biodiversity. Due to time and availability constraints I’ve pull back from these activities and Foundation Ecology is now focused on providing periodic educational content on local biodiversity.
Continuing on from what I learnt in my Backyard Biodiversity experiment on my previous property, in 2025 I am working on mapping the biodiversity present in an urban park, with the aim to take action to improve the biodiversity over time.
I reside in South Australia within an area considered a biodiversity hot spot, where 90% of the total land area has already been modified for human purposes.
About This Site
On this journey of discovery, I needed a place to keep my various writings, consolidate my understanding, summarise my findings and report outcomes of my experiments. As people had expressed interest in this, it seemed suitable to put it all together in one accessible location. Therefore here you can find:
- Details of my urban biodiversity species occurrence recording and experiments
- Tips and tricks for find species in your own neighbourhood
- Blog posts for my Discovery Excursions
- Guides to various BioBlitz events
- Information on what’s happening on iNaturalist in SA
- Guides to identifying local species
- Any other naturalist related activities I might get up to
- Info on any weird, unusual, interesting, and/or disturbing species I encounter.
About Citizen Science
As defined by the Australia Citizen Science Association:
“citizen science involves public participation and collaboration in scientific research with the aim to increase scientific knowledge”
About iNaturalist
As explained on the iNaturalist site:
“iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature. It’s also a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool. You can use it to record your own observations, get help with identifications, collaborate with others to collect this kind of information for a common purpose, or access the observational data collected by iNaturalist users.”
Disclaimer
Discovering the biodiversity that surrounds us all is a pastime for me. I am not a scientist, specialist, nor expert in any of the subjects I present here. I do the utmost to ensure that information provided is accurate, including references and links where possible, and clarifying personal opinion or experience where presented. Take the information here as the first step on your own journey of discovery.
Epistemic Curiosity 