It may seem unimportant, irrelevant, or downright nit picky, but back in March 2022 I contacted the Atlas of Living Australia because I’d noticed an anomaly in their dataset feeds from iNaturalist.org. Let me explain.

As you may be aware if you read my Facebook page, I upload my observations to that platform in order to help me identify species and so we have a record of what is living here on Norfolk Island. iNaturalist is a global platform. Similar to iNaturalist, you can also upload your observations to the Atlas of Living Australia, which is the preeminent Australian platform. Now I don't know about you, but I don’t have the time or resources to be sitting here duplicating my uploads. However, very conveniently, ALA has a handy form that you can tick, which allows you to opt in and have your iNaturalist observations migrated across to the ALA, just like that. Easy peasy.

Except for here on Norfolk Island there seemed to be a roadblock, and our observations weren’t recognised as being from Australia.

Now putting politics aside about the status of Norfolk Island, why is it important that our observations are included in the ALA?

Because. Science + research. That’s all. As it says on the ALA website:

“Citizen science is becoming an increasingly significant and important contributor to the pool of data being used to create a more accurate picture of our biodiversity and ultimately advance scientific knowledge.”

...

“BioCollect fills a significant gap in data collection tools, supporting scientists wanting to engage the public in their research and the public wanting to participate in important scientific work, including collecting their own observation data.”

Which comes back to a question I often ask: how can you protect something when you don't know what it is? Well, you can't.

Which is why I fired off emails at semi-regular intervals to anyone I thought would listen.

Anyway, today, 16 August 2023, thanks to the wonderful people at the Australian Museum and at the ALA, citizen science data from the external territories of Australia, including Ashmore and Cartier Islands; Christmas Island; Cocos Keeling Island; Coral Sea Islands; Heard and McDonald Islands; and Norfolk Island have finally been included for anyone who opted in for this to happen. Needless to say, I am over the moon.

The photo above is of the Norfolk Island blenny, Parablennius serratolineatus, which, incidentally, is only found in a 20 km radius of Norfolk Island, so it’s a pretty special little guy. Moreover, I used to see these down at the pier end of Slaughter Bay all the time, but haven’t spotted any since February this year (2023), despite looking out for them any time I’m snorkelling at that end.