This weekend (and another in May) has the City Nature Challenge[1], which encourages people to photograph wildlife -- that definitely includes insects! -- and u

This weekend (and another in May) has the City Nature Challenge[1], which encourages people to photograph wildlife -- that definitely includes insects! -- and upload the photos to iNaturalist[2], where naturalists will help to identify them. Although I find people usually help identify whatever I photograph all year. The observations can then be used in research, since iNaturalist sends their data to GBIF.org (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility). For example, this paper[3] used 120429 records from GBIF, which very likely included some records originating at iNaturalist. I haven't read the paper in any detail, but the researchers probably started from something like this query [4] of hundreds of thousands of bee records, before filtering further. [1] http://citynaturechallenge.org/ http://citynaturechallenge.org/ [2] https://www.inaturalist.org/ https://www.inaturalist.org/ [3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2016.03.023 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2016.03.023 [4] https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/search?taxon_key=1357156&taxon_key=1357207&taxon_key=1344087&taxon_key=1341976&taxon_key=1340542&taxon_key=1340301&taxon_key=1340405&taxon_key=1340503&taxon_key=1335648&taxon_key=5039354&taxon_key=5039293&taxon_key=5039314 https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/search?taxon_key=1357156&tax...