About

About Me

Interested in all things science and technology, I turned my focus to biodiversity and life on Earth circa 2018 when I was unable to answer questions my children raised about the natural world. In building my knowledge base, I spend what 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 26,000 records of encounters with various species, and supplemented my knowledge by communicating and collaborating with like minded citizen scientists.

I now 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 27,000 identifications, I share tidbits of fascinating information and provide links to more in-depth resources.

Turning this knowledge into practical application, I have modified my suburban property with the aim of maximising its biodiversity. I’ve have recorded over 650 species on the property and track plant-animal associations. I aim to utilise any new information I uncover to build urban biodiversity, literally, from the ground up.

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 Backyard Biodiversity+ experiments
  • Blog posts for each Species Discovery Excursion
  • Guides to various BioBlitz events
  • Links to my iNaturalist Projects including the South Australian iNaturalists Project
  • Guides to identifying local species

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.