Know Nature. Conserve Nature.

I like to ask, "how can we protect that which we don't know to exist?"

I work for a land conservancy, and yes, land can be protected without knowing all of its components. Over the last few decades the land trust movement has protected millions of acres and thus millions of creatures, but I contend that truly vigorous and effective conservation requires a thorough understanding of biodiversity in addition to protecting land.

Understanding biodiversity is knowing where species are located, their distributions, and the threats they face; and the tool to understanding biodiversity is the biological survey (in some manner or another). Think of the benefits of a survey:

- Provide a basis for making decisions
- Set priorities or targets
- Know what you have that is unique and/or rare
- A baseline for tracking future changes
- Can evaluate actions, intentional or unintentional ones
- Useful in describing and explaining a place
- and others...

The iNaturalist community is building the foundation to conservation through their observations, which increase our understanding of biodiversity. I am working on expanding the reach of iNaturalist by targeting private landowners with www.RateMyLand.com. The main premise is connecting landowners with naturalists who can help them identify creatures.

Would you like to be a Rate My Land consultant - it's free and there are no obligations to signing up, which is simply giving me your information so that I can put it up on the website (http://www.ratemyland.com/consultants). I am actively trying to build a long list of motivated amateur to professional consultants to network with landowners. Some iNat folks already have their info up on the site. I'd love to put yours up there too, contact me if interested to learn more.

If after checking out Rate My Land you find that you agree with the mission, keep in touch and encourage landowners that you know to consider having their land rated with a Rate My Land survey. If you own land, you can create a profile for your land on RML and you may want to consider hiring a consultant to complete a Rate My Land survey.

I would like assistance getting the word out, so I am tagging two folks, @charlie & @muir and encouraging you to comment and tag two others who you can ask if they would read my post and pass the tagging-of-two along. I appreciate your time; keep in touch. Thank you, - Derek

Posted on February 23, 2016 04:03 AM by calloftheloon