New England Nature Watch

We would like to share an opportunity for New England Trail (NET) volunteers and hikers who are interested in helping AMC's community science efforts. This is the New England Nature Watch, a project that AMC and NET partners administer using the iNaturalist app. The New England Nature Watch project was launched in 2021 and allows you to provide data on plants in the NET corridor to AMC. This helps us better understand the effects of climate change on plants along the trail, such as changes to flowering times and species distribution. INaturalist is an app that allows you to identify nearly any plant or animal you find. The app assigns a location and date of the photo taken and catalogs it online, where the iNaturalist community will help to confirm the identification. It can be downloaded on the App store for iOS devices and Play Store for Android devices. Once you've downloaded the app, you can join one or more projects that the AMC is monitoring: the New England Nature Watch, Flowers and Fauna of the Appalachian Trail Corridor, and the Northeast Alpine Flower Watch. Once you've joined the project, all you have to do is be near the NET, the Appalachian Trail corridor, or anywhere in the Northeast and take a photo of the plant or animal you want to identify. We have over 5,500 total observations of 570 species so far, and we hope you all are able to contribute!