Citizen science platforms including iNaturalist are leading to major new discoveries and are becoming crucial to the work of scientists. How do we make them even better?
It took such a constellation of unlikely events syncing up, it's almost unbelievable it happened at all.
Aaron Bean was banding birds on a sprawling outback station in a remote corner of northern Queensland when he spotted a plant that looked interesting.
A professional horticulturalist, Aaron snapped a couple of photos and, when he got back to phone reception, uploaded his finding to the vast citizen scientist database, iNaturalist.
Four million people across the globe have logged almost 300 million observations of more than five hundred thousand species to iNaturalist, making it one of the largest citizen science platforms in the world.
Once online, Aaron's pictures found their way to a different Bean, Anthony Bean, an expert botanist from the Queensland Herbarium who immediately recognised the plant as something very special indeed: a presumed extinct plant not seen since the 1960s that he had described himself ten years earlier.
"It was very serendipitous," says Thomas Mesaglio from the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, who has written about the rediscovery for the Australian Journal of Botany .
"Aaron Bean is an avid iNaturalist user who opportunistically took some photos of a few plants that were interesting on the property."
A chance find
Ptilotus senarius is a small, slender shrub with pleasing purple-pink flowers that look a bit like an exploding firework with feathers.
It's found only in a band of rough country near the Gulf of Carpentaria, and hadn't been collected since 1967-presumed to be one of the 900 or so plant species that have gone extinct in the wild internationally since the 1750s.
But with Anthony and Aaron Beans's keen eyes, and a land-owner willing to gather a specimen, Ptilotus senarius is now confirmed to still be hanging on, and actually recently moved onto the critically endangered species list where scientists and conservationists can help it.
"It's one of these situations where everything had to fall into place and there was a bit of good fortune involved," says Mesaglio.
It's just the latest example of an emerging trend: citizen scientists snapping pictures of plants and animals they come across, uploading them to databases like iNaturalist, only to learn they've stumbled upon something we thought was lost, or else is completely new to science.
It means iNaturalist is becoming an invaluable resource to people like Thomas Mesaglio who, constrained by the vastness and diversity of a place as big as Australia, can't be everywhere.
And given that freehold land covers around a third of the Australian continent, often scientists have difficulty accessing many areas in the first place.
"If you are the property owner or you're someone who has permission from the owner to be there then suddenly it opens up this whole new world," Mesaglio says.
Farmer wants a scientific discovery
Scientists want to make these databases even better by getting more members of the community involved and taking high-quality, data rich pictures, and most crucially they want more landowners to do the same.
For example, in New South Wales, the Land Libraries project run by the state government's Biodiversity Conservation Trust provides equipment and training to landowners in how to document the biodiversity on their properties and upload it to citizen science platforms.
Mesaglio is supportive of these programmes and wants to see them expanded not just because it gives him digital access behind the fences of private properties, but because more people using these tools has a conservation benefit in and of itself.
"Engaging landholders themselves with science and the natural world and getting them more passionate about diversity makes them far more likely to be interested and invested in protecting that diversity," Mesaglio says.
For people interested in using iNaturalist for the first time, Mesaglio says to be most useful to scientists you need to provide as much information about your observation as possible.
A close up of a flower, for example, might not provide enough information if that flower is from a group of dozens of different plants with similar looking flowers, but taking many pictures of other features as well, such as the entire plant, bark and the leaves, can provide a lot more information.
It's one of these situations where everything had to fall into place and there was a bit of good fortune involved.
Improving the dataset
Mesaglio also wants people to record that extra bit of information that might not necessarily be visible in a photograph, things like soil type or what other plants are growing nearby, or if it had pollinators visiting.
Even attributes like plant smell can give scientists vital clues about a plant's identity, Mesaglio says.
"The more information you can provide and the more context you can provide, the more potential uses that that record will have in the future."
In separate research, Mesaglio found iNaturalist had been cited in papers covering 128 countries and thousands of species, underscoring how important the resource has become.
With more finds uploaded every day, and the quality of the data improving, Mesaglio knows there are even more discoveries waiting to be found.
