French generalist naturalist | 24 years old | He/him | 🌈

Interested in the whole living world, wherever I go! 😁

📌 In French Guiana (❤️) since 2020
Coming from the northwest of Paris
Lived shortly in Québec (2019) and in southern France (2019-2020 and 2021-2022)

👨‍🎓 Master's degree in field ecology in Montpellier University (french mediterranean coast)

💼 Studying French Guiana's biodiversity and working for its protection, first on behalf of an environmental conservation association, GEPOG, then for a consultancy firm, AGE, and from 2025 onwards as a freelancer.

🧐 Expertise on birds and butterflies in French Guiana, but also knowledge of many other taxa in this area. Mainly into birds, moths, butterflies, dragonflies and orthoptera in western Europe. Growing interest for botany in both areas currently!

✈️ A keen traveler, I nevertheless only fly for work and to visit family and friends in Europe, max. once a year (for environmental reasons, although that's obviously not enough in the current situation).

@ Feel free to tag me on your data if you want to add a species into iNat system, to have my opinion about your IDs, of for anything else! ✌️

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Main current projects:

• Writing of a guide to the Hesperiidae Eudaminae of French Guiana with @ninopage
• Formation of a collection of butterflies from this area (Hesperiidae and Nymphalidae Satyrinae)
• Surveys of little-known areas in preparation for a bird atlas of French Guiana
• Implementation of the international waterbird counts (Neotropical Waterbird Census - NWC) in French Guiana

Current noticeable actions on iNat :

• Addition of all the missing species of American Hesperiidae to the iNaturalist system based on the list on the “Butterflies of America” website
• Addition of French Guianan taxa (fauna and flora) that are missing in the iNat system, depending on the opportunities
• Management of flora and butterfly data in French Guiana via the “Flore de Guyane” and “Papillons de jour de Guyane” projects
• Co-organization of the City Nature Challenge in French Guiana
• Transmission of second-hand data from other observers to feed iNaturalist via my secondary account @jpio2ndhand
• Adding my old observations to iNaturalist so I can use it as a personal "Pokédex" by 2025!

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Please note that I only use iNaturalist to store my naturalist pictures, to get some advice and feedback on IDs I'm not confident about, and when a database that offers the possibility to share naturalist data without picture doesn't exist in the place I am for a given taxa.

As a consequence most of my naturalist data are on other databases than iNat, mainly Faune-Guyane, Faune-France, eBird, Artemisiae (for Lepidoptera in mainland France) and CardObs. Don't hesitate to check these other cool databases!

To find my way through all these databases, I keep a yearly account of the naturalist data I've entered and the species I've observed. Feel free to consult this report >here< if you wish! At the end of 2023, it showed a total of around 145.000 data produced, for at least 6.750 distinct species.

Ultimate goal: 1 million naturalist data produced (and produced in a useful way, not just “to boost the score”) before I die! 🤞

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It's always a pleasure for me to exchange with other naturalists, whoever they may be, so don't hesitate to contact me via the iNat messaging system if you have any questions! 😊 Otherwise, here's my e-mail address: julien.piolain@gmail.com

[ebird profile] [Faune-Guyane profile] [Researchgate profile] [YouTube channel]