In case you haven’t noticed…

Notes from Nature (NFN) just relaunched and we are hoping folks will give our new site a whirl, and tell us what you think!   As with the previous version of Notes From Nature, we will feature a variety of natural history museum specimens types such as plants, insects, crabs, butterflies, birds and so on. Your efforts help unlock the vast treasure trove of data that is contained within the 2 billion specimens housed in museums around the world!

Why the relaunch, and why now?  Short answer:  While the original was a huge success, we saw a real need to refresh NFN, and overcome some limitations of the former platform.  After months of planning and great work by a lot of folks who we’ll acknowledge more in later posts, we are ready!

The new version of Notes From Nature that is being launched today makes use of the ZooniversePanoptes platform and will provide lots of benefits to both the researchers and the volunteers. This is just the beginning of what will be lots of exciting new features on the site.  One big change will be lots of smaller expeditions that will target a specific group and location, with more direct ties to research needs.

Before going any further though, a huge shout out to the over 9,200 volunteers from around the world who put their time, energy, enthusiasm, knowledge and hearts into helping Notes from Nature share over 1.3 million transcriptions. We are truly humbled by the response since we started in 2013. For those who have taken part in the past, we welcome you back to take part in the new and improved Notes from Nature.

Please help out by Taking Notes From Nature!  And your feedback is of course much appreciated, especially since we know that there are always some kinks to work out whenever launching a new resource. We’ll also quickly note that we do have some priority fixes we want to get live, including increasing the size of the photo window and storing content so that you can go back to previously entered information.

There are a lot of features we want to share with you about the new NFN and we’ll blog about them in the coming days and weeks.  If any of you reading this are digitizing collections and want to take part in Notes from Nature, a huge advantage of the new system is that it is MUCH easier to build expeditions and get them to be part of NFN.  Please feel free to contact the NFN team, especially Michael Denslow (michael.denslow@gmail.com) and Rob Guralnick (robgur@gmail.com) and we’ll explain the process.

We are excited to hear from you and  look forward to seeing you on Facebook, Twitter and our blog.