Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, South Florida Caribbean CESU

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The Western Ecological Research Center of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is offering a funding opportunity to Partner of the Cooperative Ecosystems Studies Unit (CESU) Program. The project is titled ⿿Integrating Biodiversity Information Sources for Analysis and Rapid Detection of Changes in Species Associated with National Parks⿝ As patterns of land use and climate change in North America, countless species of plants and animals respond by moving into new areas. This can affect the conservation and stewardship of biodiversity, but detecting shifts is an enormous challenge for resource management agencies. With the availability of new mobile technologies, citizen science efforts are helping cover more ground more regularly. During the 2016 National Park Service Centennial ⿿BioBlitz⿝, visitors to over 100 national parks used the iNaturalist app on mobile devices, such as smartphones, to document species they observed in parks. This was the largest BioBlitz effort ever, and the partnership with iNaturalist meant that species observations during the nationwide events were entered directly into a single, geo-referenced database often with photographs allowing verification of taxonomic identification. However, this large spatially-explicit database within the growing iNaturalist dataset must be integrated with other biodiversity data to be of direct use to National Parks natural resource managers, partners, and researchers.

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