WeDigBio is now underway! Please stop by Notes from Nature today to get involved.

For this event we are featuring California Plants and Salamanders. Visit one of those projects and select an expedition to work on or feel free to contribute to any project that interests you.

Thank you,

— The Notes from Nature Team

WeDigBio starts is less than a week. The event takes place April 10-13, 2025. People from all over the world join together to digitize museum specimen data and to celebrate biodiversity collections. We hope you can join us.

Notes from Nature will have lots of great expeditions to contribute to. We’ll be featuring bees, salamanders and California plants so please stop by. It’s also very helpful if you can spread the word about this unique and important event.

Looking forward to it,

— The Notes from Nature Team

The next WeDigBio is a month away! The event will take place April 10-13. People from all over the world join together to digitize specimen data and to celebrate biodiversity collections. We hope you join us!

This is can be a fun and festive weekend at NfN. We’ll have a “classifying blitz” online at Notes from Nature, where we’ll classify as many Subjects as we can during the event. There will be new expeditions, and some of our data providers will host events such as online talks, tours, and discussions (and possibly some in-person events as well), so you’ll have opportunities to meet them and learn about their work.

Please invite your family, friends, and colleagues to participate. They can support biodiversity research by digitizing natural history collections data. We’ll post updates as we get closer to the event.

— The Notes from Nature Team

Our new expedition, Notes from Nature: 1935-present: Bay Area Collections, continues our journey into San Francisco Bay Area botany, following our previous expedition, which focused on 1800–1935. As botanical work became more established in the Bay Area, so did its growing cities. In the post-war era, the Bay Area became increasingly urbanized. While some development projects succeeded, others (in some cases, thankfully) failed. One such failed attempt was the “Reber Plan,” a proposal to dam the bay. This plan was abandoned after the Bay Model, a to-scale hydraulic model of the San Francisco Bay, demonstrated that it would cause catastrophic flooding. Another unsuccessful development was the proposed city of Marincello, which would have been built in what is now the Marin Headlands. Fortunately, large areas of the Bay Area remained protected, preserving crucial habitats and allowing botanizing in the region to continue. As botanical collections grew, several new facilities were built, including the Eastwood Hall of Botany, completed in 1959, and the Wattis Hall, completed in 1975. Here is a selection of photos from our CAS Herbarium photo album, showcasing some of the places and people involved in 20th-century Bay Area botany. Don’t forget to check out our new expedition to learn more about the Bay Area’s botanical heritage!

Credit for the information in the captions and compiled photos goes to “One Hundred and Fifty Years of Botany at the California Academy of Sciences 1853-2003” by Thomas F. Daniel. You can click on the link to learn much more about the history of botany at the California Academy of Sciences.

Notes from Nature is currently down. Please note that there is a Zooniverse system wide outage. We know the Zooniverse Team is working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, and will continue to provide updates on their progress. Please check https://status.zooniverse.org/ for updates.

Thanks for your patience

— The Notes from Nature Team

In our newest expedition at #CASPlantsToPixels, we will focus on a sampling of plants from several bordering but distinct regions in California. The Trinity Alps, Klamath Mountains, the Shasta-Siskiyou national forest and Lassen National Park form a vast expanse of wilderness, stretching from Trinity County in the west to Lassen County in the east. This region also serves as a transition zone between the Northern Sierra and the Cascade Mountains. Some areas, like the Trinity Alps, are extremely botanically diverse. The Trinity Alps and Klamath Mountains ecoregion serves as an intersection between the warmer Californian Mediterranean climate and the wetter Pacific Northwestern climate. Flora native to the Sierras, Pacific Northwest, and Coast all converge in this region, making it a biodiversity hotspot. For example, the Trinity Alps boast the second-highest diversity of conifer species in the world.

Come check out our expedition on the Notes from Nature – CAS Plants to Pixels and help transcribe this unique and beautiful ecoregion! 

Here are some notable plant species you can find in our expedition…

Phacelia greenei
Phacelia greenei, or the Scott Valley phacelia, is endemic to the southern Klamath Mountains and belongs to the Boraginaceae family. It is only observed in the Scott Valley and its surrounding mountains. Phacelia greenei prefers growing in serpentine soils.

Gayophytum diffusum

Gayophytum diffusum, also called spreading ground smoke, grows in the mountainous habitats of California and western North America. It is a member of the taxonomic family Onagraceae, or the willowherb family. Gayophytum diffusum grows to about half a meter tall and has small white flowers with thin stems.

Streptanthus tortuosus

Streptanthus tortuosus, also called mountain jewelflower or shieldplant, is native to the mountains of northern California, Nevada, and Oregon. Streptanthus tortuosus is a member of the taxonomic family Brassicaceae, or the mustard family. It prefers to grow in rocky and sandy areas of forested regions. Its flowers can come in several colors, including shades of purple, pale yellow, or white.

We wanted to take a moment and acknowledge all the work you have done on our digitization project: Ranges: Mammal Traits from western North America, we are incredibly grateful for your contributions. I also wanted to share a bit about our collections. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is home to about 101,000 cataloged mammal specimens. Our collections date back to the late 1800’s and represent specimens from around the world, with a regional focus on California and the surrounding areas. About half of our terrestrial mammal specimens are from the Ranges geographic focal area, western North America.

As you know, the goal of the Ranges project is to “mobilize” the trait data that has not been uploaded to databases. For our collection this has meant enlisting students, staff, and volunteers to look at specimen tags, verify data in the database, and image tags for individuals that have trait data missing from the database. These images have been used for you to transcribe the data, but they will also be uploaded to our database as part of the specimen record. The imaging work has largely taken place in the collections work spaces, but we have also had the opportunity to do demonstrations and talk with museum visitors about the project.

If you are interested in reading a bit more and seeing some pictures of our team in action, there is a story about the project here. 

Your work in combination with our staff and volunteers has resulted in improved data for:

374 species (from shrews to gophers and weasels to bats) with trait data confirmed for 23,817 specimens and tags imaged and transcribed for 22,670 specimens. Thank you!

Over the weekend Notes from Nature reached another big milestone. We reached 5 million classifications on our current platform. The first version of the Notes from Nature platform received over 1 million classification so that puts us at 6 million for the life of the project!

We first and foremost want to first thank all of our amazing volunteers for getting us and keeping us here! Without you, this project isn’t possible. We also wanted to acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation, the organization that has provides us with the vast majority of our funding over the years. The National Science Foundation provides critical funding for projects like ours and without them there’s a good chance we won’t still be here today.

These big milestones are great, but remember that each classification is important and we value each and every volunteer who has helped get us to this point!

Please help us celebrate by visiting Notes from Nature and helping us spread the word. We’ve got lots of fun and interesting things to work on from plants, to bee and mammals.

With gratitude,

The Notes from Nature Team

We have an exciting new expedition in our Labs project. It’s called LightningBug Text Correct and we’ll ask you to utilize the relatively new Text From Subject task. The basic idea is to look at the label image as well the OCR output and correct any issues you see. 

We hope it will be a fun and relatively straightforward task. These labels are unique in that they are not typical label images, but label reconstructions. Unlike many insect specimen images these images are taken with the insect and labels still on the pin using multiple cameras and angles. These label reconstructions are basically models of the labels based on several camera angles taken using the LightningBig system. The text is then read using Google’s OCR tools. You can learn more about the project on their website https://www.lightningbug.tech/ .

Our job now is to assess how well the text came out and see where we can make improvement to the label text itself. For example in the label below there would be no corrections since the text was captured correctly. Note that the object coming out between the 7 and 0 is the specimen pin. These images are captured while the specimen and labels are still on the pin so you will this frequently in this dataset.

You can give it a try on our Notes from Nature Labs project.

Our newest expedition from California Academy of Sciences is Plants of the Southern California Coast.

The coast of southern California is populated with coastal mountain ranges, chaparral, and sage scrubland. The Transverse Ranges on the coast include the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains, which can rise above 10,000 ft (around 3,000 m). Inland, the habitat transitions into arid and semi-arid desert climates that overlap with the range of many California desert natives. The Channel Islands off the coast of Los Angeles, Ventura, and Santa Barbara counties also offer separate and unique habitats where several plant species unique to the islands can be found. In addition to harboring its own regional plants, the southern California coast overlaps with the ranges of many plants found in neighboring Mexico and Arizona. Here are a few interesting species of plants that can be found in this region:

Stachys bullata – Also known as California hedgenettle, it is a member of the mint family, Lamiaceae. It can be found up and down the California coast, including in the coastal valleys of the Channel Islands. The California hedgenettle prefers to grow in damp and shaded areas.

Datura wrightii – A plant significant to Indigenous California culture, Datura wrightii is also called Sacred Datura and is a member of the family Solanaceae. Its natural range includes northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States. At night, Datura wrightii is often pollinated by hawk moths. This plant was used as a religious hallucinogen by the Chumash and Tongva people of Southern California. (Warning!: Do not try this; it can cause seizures and functional blindness.) This flower also appeared prominently in the art of Georgia O’Keeffe, with one painting of Datura wrightii selling for $45 million. That’s a pricey plant!

Cordylanthus rigidus – A member of the family Orobanchaceae, it is also known by the common name stiffbranch bird’s beak. This plant is native to California and Baja California and can be found in coastal mountains and flats. This plant is unusual in that it is parasitic and steals resources from other plants instead of relying completely on photosynthesis.

You can try out Plants of the Southern California Coast here: https://bit.ly/4cBICKK