Marine Mollusks of the Eastern Seaboard Project, dead or alive?
There is a new project on iNat called "Eastern Seaboard Mollusks". This is part of a huge new overall project that is funded by the National Science Foundation of the US Government. Here is the iNat part of it:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/eastern-seaboard-mollusks
If you have any interest in marine mollusks of the Eastern Seaboard, please consider joining this Project so you get updates and news.
The function of the overall project is accumulate and refine vast amounts of data about marine mollusks (shelled or shell-less, dead or alive) from the Eastern Seaboard of the United States of America. The data is coming frrom museum collections and from iNat too of course.
Please note that the phrase "Eastern Seaboard" does not just imply what we call the East Coast, but also includes all of the coast of the State of Florida and all of the US part of the Gulf of Mexico.
I would request that everyone and anyone who has made iNat marine mollusk observations from anywhere in that geographical area, or who looks at observations from those areas made by other people, to please go through all the relevant observations and add the annotation "dead" or "alive". Once you have done that, those obs will be automatically be included in this vast, important, and very valuable project. But without that annotation, the obs will not be included.
And please, do this not only for your own observation, but also if you come across or notice any other observations from anyone else that are observations of marine mollusks from the Eastern Seaboard, if those observations do not have the dead or alive annotation, would you please take a moment to add that to those too?
Many malacologists will be grateful, as will fisheries specialists and many others.
Thanks,
Susan
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Hi Susan,
For the Caterpillars of Eastern North America project a troop of volunteers goes through eligible observations and assigns the larva life stage annotation. Perhaps you could enlist your fellow molluscophiles to do the same? Here is the journal post where people volunteered to take specific states to cover: Adopt-a-State to Annotate
Looks like a big and worthwhile project. Good luck!
Mark
Good point. Yes, anyone can add the "dead" or "alive" annotation to any observation. They do not have to be your observations for you to do this.
People could adopt their state coastline, or their county coastline, and try to make sure that all the marine mollusk observations in that area have the necessary annotation.
That would be great.
I added a couple of sentences to my journal post to make that clear.
@oceanicadventures -- I wanted to tell you about this so you could add annotations to other people's observations as you come across them, please?
I’ll try my best but the thing is that I use the phone app which is really bad since it’s missing many, many features, including annotations. I’ll try bringing out my computer more and just annotate as many observations as I can.
Also, what are they trying to see with this data?
It will enable them over time to track changes in ranges due to Global Warming, and other kinds of population shifts, for example when introduced species are spreading, or if species are disappearing from certain areas due to pollution or overexploitation.
And it will map out what lives where, which is very useful info.
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