Great Smoky Mountains National Park iNaturalist Data Processing into NPSpecies Evidence

Straub, Kendra

iNaturalist is an ‘online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature’ (iNaturalist website). While iNaturalist contains a wealth of data, the crowd-sourced nature of the data has made it challenging to integrate into GRSM data repositories on any wholesale level. While many of the observations are likely valid, it is challenging to know identify these high quality records. Instead of ingesting all, or some, of the iNaturalist observation into our systems, such as NPSpecies, we propose a ‘soft integration’ methodology. Soft integration means that we will use these data as an early warning system for encroaching and/or invasive species, an alert to potentially new location of species of special concern such as green-headed coneflower (which is undergoing review as collection by Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is planned for), a source of data for high-importance species such as species for which we only need a few more records to be able to utilize in the Atlas of the Smokies applications which require at least 30 spatially distinct observations.