Earth Day – Our One Year Anniversary

A year ago to this day, on Earth Day 2013, we launched Notes from Nature. Our choice of launch date reflects our hope that Notes from Nature can be a part of the Earth Day mission of creating a sustainable, green future. Every transcription that has been done over the last year brings a new data point onto our map of biodiversity. Taken together, we can finally assemble richer and deeper understanding of this amazing world all of us inhabit. With that knowledge, we can be better able to make wise choices about our planet’s future. Whether bugs, mushrooms, plants, birds or the myriad millions of species described or undescribed, our world is brimming with life, and our understanding deepened and stregthened with the meticulous efforts to collect and catalog that diversity.

So we are having a birthday party, in case you couldn’t guess from our front page, and we want you to join us! Come celebrate Earth Day and Notes from Nature both. Help us do something we never even thought possible — help us get our 500,000th transcription. We are that close, and we think it might be possible to get over the hump on our birthday. How cool would that be?

We mostly wanted to take the opportunity today to again thank every single transcriber out there for even tackling one record on Notes from Nature. We continue to be awed and amazed and appreciative of the effort you put in. We are pleased to have some new and exciting features coming your way at Notes from Nature in the next days and weeks and we hope we can keep this engaging and fun and productive in the long term for everyone. We also hope that the cool specimens and organisms you see on Notes from Nature speak for themselves. We think they tell the story of this green planet, on Earth Day no less, better than anything else.

Thanks again and take a second to wish us a happy one year anniversary!