Usery Mountain Recreation Area's Journal

Join us for an interactive program at Usery's Nature Center on Saturday, Nov 10th at 2:00 p.m.

By taking photos of plants and animals while exploring the Usery Mountain Recreation Area, your sightings can become part of our iNaturalist citizen science project to help us better understand and protect the park's incredible wildlife.

At Saturday's program, participants will learn about this project and how to submit observations into iNaturalist. Please bring your own smartphone or digital camera, if you have one, as well as closed-toe shoes for the outdoor portion of the class.

Our project has reached an exciting milestone… iNaturalist observers have now documented at least 100 different wildlife species within the Usery Mountain Recreation Area!

More than half of the species documented are plants, which comes as no surprise because these are the easiest organisms to photograph. We've also documented 15 species of birds, 11 reptiles, 6 insects, 5 mammals, and 2 arachnids. You can learn more here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/flora-fauna-of-usery-mountain-recreation-area?tab=stats

There still are plenty more species to be documented, so I’m creating a lofty goal of increasing our species count to 119 by the start of the new year. If you've seen a species that is not yet included in our project, please add your observation to help our species list grow. For a full list of all of the species included in our project thus far, see:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/flora-fauna-of-usery-mountain-recreation-area?tab=species

Thank you to everyone who has contributed wildlife sightings to our project to help us reach this first big milestone!