Myco-Consortium talk April 4: Damon Tighe
As part of the MST's membership in the Myco-Consortium series of Zoom talks, MST members are invited to join the presentation on Thursday, April 4th at 7:30pm ET:
iNaturalist: Observing Mushrooms, Making Data, Motivating Mycologists Through Project Stewardship
A talk by Damon Tighe
Thursday April 4th, 7:30pm ET
iNaturalist is a powerful community science tool that allows users to easily contribute observations of mushrooms and other organisms to the world's largest public database of species biogeography. In the process of contributing data users are able to increase their knowledge of species by suggestions from a well trained artificial intelligence and by a number of active mycologist that curate the data that enters the platform. The ability to collect metadata from microscopy to DNA sequences to chemical reactions and the capacity to point to other observations of host plants etc makes for extremely rich observations. Observations can be collected into projects that can be sliced based upon geography, time, species of interest, etc and allows for real-time monitoring. This presentation will dig into the basics of how to use iNaturalist; making observations, mining data, and using projects. I will highlight the Fungal Diversity Survey's CA FUNDIS Year 1 project where over 5,000 vouchered collections were made and many of them received DNA sequencing as a model for project stewardship.
About Damon Tighe
Damon Tighe is an amateur mycologist from Oakland California who is a big user of the iNaturalist platform. He is a collector for the California Fungal Diversity Survey (FUNDIS) and has done fungal surveys in Ecuador, Arizona, among other locales using iNaturalist as the primary tool to collect and share data with stakeholders. In his professional life he was a former researcher on the Human Genome Project and now helps translate biotechnology techniques into classroom activities for educational institutions across the country.
How to Join: