Happy New Year to the Notes from Nature Community

We realize that 2020 was a difficult year and we appreciate that so many were willing and able to spend some time with us. Together we completed over 100 expeditions, had over 1 million classifications and gained many new users.

It turns out that we were able to provide some assistance to institutions and people working from home during some challenging times. We are so grateful to our many volunteers and for your help moving biodiversity science forward each and every day.

We have some great news for the new year. Notes from Nature recently received some additional funding from the National Science Foundation and we have some exciting plans for 2021. The project is called DigiLeap. We’ll be sharing more details in the coming months, but the main purpose of the project is to make transcription more efficient and make greater use of automated tools when feasible. Most of this will be happening “behind the scenes.” For example, by using algorithms to separate images that are more likely to be automatically processed and don’t need to be seen by humans. We’ll actually be asking for your help with some of that to test and validate these new algorithms. We are excited and grateful to be able to keep advancing our software and continue to mobilize as much biodiversity data as possible.

All the best,

The Notes from Nature Team