shakedown.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A community for live music fans with roots in the jam scene. Shakedown Social is run by a team of volunteers (led by @clifff and @sethadam1) and funded by donations.

Administered by:

Server stats:

264
active users

#iNat

0 posts0 participants0 posts today
Continued thread

I signed up on #iNaturalist about 5 years ago and did a few postings/observations. Then, more recently I spoke with enough biologists who said they used the data and it was quite important and encouraged me to contribute to it, especially since I go to out-of-the-way places a lot (look at my observations map).

But, first, I took the time to read through their data/surveillance policy and, while I assumed bots would be *nonconsensually* scraping the data, contributing seemed useful enough to science that I could hold my nose and accept that. But direct, unmediated collaboration with Google and AI-anything is off the table for me.

Bummer, really.

Well...I cannot say I am pleased about iNaturalist partnering with Google to develop GenAI. While what iNat would like to do would be incredibly helpful, it can be done by other means (namely, uh, volunteer or employed actual experts?). My main concerns are simple, and yet, unaddressed by the iNaturalist post about this project:
1) How can we be assured that our data that we share with iNaturalist will NOT be shared with Google; as if anything it seems to suggest free sharing between iNat and Google to develop things using Google's GenAI; thus Google does have access even if indirectly.
2) Will we have an opt-out option, so our data is not used in this project

In the end, nature is about community, not machines. And I do not consent to feeding any of my data into Google's GenAI for any purpose.

Photo is one that was used in a presentation, and one of the questions asked by a 60-something year old Doctor of Biology was "That photo is so good! Is it AI?" :blobfacepalm:

(If you want to see their announcement, inaturalist.org/posts/113184-i )

Today the City Nature Challenge starts! The Philly project on iNaturalist is here:

:inaturalist: inaturalist.org/projects/city-

One really useful tool is this website that checks what species haven't been observed yet during the challenge, sorted by how commonly they are observed:

targets.cncphilly.org/

So finding one of these species is an easy way to start helping. Let's show the world how much nature there is in Philly!

iNaturalistCity Nature Challenge 2025: Greater Philadelphia AreaPhiladelphia is competing in the City Nature Challenge again and we need your help to win! Cities around the world will be competing against each other to see who can rack up the most observations, see the most species and get the most people out recording nature. Despite being a fairly densely populated area, Philadelphia and its surrounding counties have an impressive diversity of wildlife. This annual event is organized by Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and California Academy of Sciences. Here's how to participate: 1. Go out - You can go to one of our scheduled bioblitz event or go exploring on your own. You can even hang out in your own backyard. 2. Find any wild thing - Plant, mammal, bird, insect, fungi, fish, or even evidence of living organisms like tracks, scat. A tree gnawed by a beaver can even count as 2 observations! One for the tree and another for the beaver (even if you didn't actually see the beaver). 3. Make a recording of it - Pictures are preferred,...