AT: NPAT Texas Nature Trackers & iNaturalist 101 with Mary Spolyar

Hybrid.  March 27th 7pm. Houston Chapter Native Prairie Association monthly program and meeting.

To register for zoom invite complete form here.

Have you seen a SGCN recently? (Species of Great Conservation Need). Texas Nature Trackers wants to know!  Come learn about TPWD’s Texas Nature Trackers team and how you can help track Texas’s Species of Greatest Conservation Need, as well as other Texas flora and fauna.  iNaturalist is an important tool for tracking SGCN’s, so we’ll spend most of our time together learning the basics of using iNaturalist, both via the phone app and the web.  We’ll even practice indoors (I’ll bring some willing subjects).  If attending via Zoom, please gather something from outdoors to use during practice.

Please come prepared by creating your iNaturalist account.  Go here:  https://iNaturalist.org and click on Sign Up.  During the set up be sure to set your time zone to Central Time.  After your account set up is complete, please download the iNaturalist app to your phone.  Prefer not to use your phone?  That’s ok, we’ll cover how to upload observations from a camera too.

Want another great reason to learn or brush up on iNaturalist?  iNaturalist’s City Nature Challenge, a worldwide friendly competition among cities, returns next month from April 26 through April 29.  Since 2017, the Houston-Galveston team has placed in the top 5 cities globally for highest number of species observed.  We’ll hope you’ll be part of continuing our success in 2024!

Mary Spolyar is a Texas Master Naturalist in the Gulf Coast Chapter and a plant knowledge instructor for the Native Landscape Certification Program (NLCP) classes offered by the Native Plant Society of Texas Houston Chapter.  She enjoys volunteering for Houston Audubon’s Natives Nursery, for which she visits local prairie remnants to collect seeds and helps to grow out native plants.  A native Houstonian, she loves being outdoors, observing life and stalking small creatures with her cell phone camera.  You can find her on iNaturalist as “rednat”.

Log in VMS under AT:  Native Prairies Association of Texas and/or Houston Chapter-Native Prairies Association of Texas (HNPAT)