Many times when we post a photo of beautiful butterfly or bird on social media we are asked when and where did you see it. Many a times this is taken very casually but this questions are very important. Here is why?
When you post these photographs, they may automatically become in a crude sense biodiversity occurrence record (Barve, 2014). Though this is not ideal method to post a record, since we are doing it anyway, why not make it complete.
First of all, let us understand what the person is behind by asking these questions. When or Date will tell the seasonality of your record. Sometimes Birds or Insects migrate or have seasonal color forms. Where is trying to understand the locality and habitat with full bearing of geography. This will help us understand the distribution of the species, or sometimes decide which sub species etc.
These should be answered is specify complete date. i.e. 2017-10-27 rather than ‘Today’, ‘Last Week’, ‘Oct 2017’ etc. Even for old photographs, in digital age, we have dates associated to the files. And for location, Village/Town, District, State and Country. Country may be dropped on groups / forums specific to a country or region.
One should not stop here, but should go ahead and make the photo records available or portals like
References:
When you post these photographs, they may automatically become in a crude sense biodiversity occurrence record (Barve, 2014). Though this is not ideal method to post a record, since we are doing it anyway, why not make it complete.
First of all, let us understand what the person is behind by asking these questions. When or Date will tell the seasonality of your record. Sometimes Birds or Insects migrate or have seasonal color forms. Where is trying to understand the locality and habitat with full bearing of geography. This will help us understand the distribution of the species, or sometimes decide which sub species etc.
These should be answered is specify complete date. i.e. 2017-10-27 rather than ‘Today’, ‘Last Week’, ‘Oct 2017’ etc. Even for old photographs, in digital age, we have dates associated to the files. And for location, Village/Town, District, State and Country. Country may be dropped on groups / forums specific to a country or region.
One should not stop here, but should go ahead and make the photo records available or portals like
- Butterflies of India (IFB)
- Moths of India
- Odonata of India
- Reptiles of India
- Amphibians of India
- Birds of India
- India Biodiversity Portal (IBP)
- iNaturalist (iNat)
References:
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Barve V. (2014) Discovering and developing primary biodiversity data from social networking sites: A novel approach. Ecological Informatics, 24, 194–199. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2014.08.008 or here
