Hey – I'm Joss!

I'm a MSc student doing Biodiversity and Conservation based at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. I have a BA in Geography from the University of Oxford.

I am an obsessed generalist documenting nature of all sorts wherever I go. Being that I've lived all my life in cities, I have a particular fascination with urban wildlife, and I hope to work in the field of urban wildlife conservation in the future. The question of how to conduct conservation in the novel urban ecosystem greatly interests me.

Put simply, I use iNaturalist to document all my wildlife findings. Simultaneously I am on an ongoing journey of learning as much as I can about identifying wildlife in UK urban areas across taxonomic groups. I find it particularly satisfying to get to grips with select groups of more tricky and less well-studied taxa, particular because by learning how to ID these and identifying for others here on iNat I can start to repay my manifold debts to the community! On that note, right now I keep an eye on two groups: incoming Epilobium observations in Greater London; and springtails (in the orders Poduromorpha and Entomobryomorpha) for the UK as a whole. For these groups I try to improve IDs down to the best reasonable rank.

I am grateful beyond words to the iNat community for all the identifications made on my observations, for answering my many questions, and for inspiring my obsession with the natural world. This website has genuinely changed my life.

If you're interested, I have a couple cool first-time records for the UK on iNaturalist which you can see here. I am quite proud of these! The first of them – this observation for the millipede Cylindroiulus vulnerarius – was pivotal in shaping my obsession with biological recording. I still find it incredible that just by poking around the back of my Oxford college I could document a species never before recorded in the whole country (at least on iNat, let's ignore GBIF right now).

On the topic – I have recently got back from spending a very fruitful two weeks in Montenegro in August 2024 from which I have so far yielded 20 iNat-first records for the country, 11 of which are firsts for the country across all platforms (going by GBIF).

You are welcome to reach out to me about anything – I am always happy to chat and check my notifications pretty continuously every single day. And, as I mentioned above, I have some experience identifying UK Poduromorpha and Entomobryomorpha springtails and UK Epilobium from photos. Feel free to @ me on any such observations and I should be able to help!