LEARN ABOUT CREATURES

Everytime you record an observation about something in the natural world, there's a chance that someone else would like to know. Local Biology supports formatting observations for world-wide sharing of eco-data. If you would like to format your observations of the natural world, here is some guidance.

Coming soon Use Local Biology observations

We will provide you with the tools you need to create observations in a format that is meaningful for exchange with a broader community of scientists, ecologists and others.

To get started, simply Record an observation. This form will guide your through your observation.

You can enter information about what you saw, when you saw it. We let you tell stories and connect this event to other phenomena.

Spotter

Another way to do this is using the firefox plugin "Spotter"
Spire (semantic prototypes -- information -- ecology -- the acronym is something related to these concepts)

This is a 'sticker' you can put on your observations in your comments. The little owl, if you click it, you will see that it takes you to a scary ugly code page. That stuff is 'RDF' -- it's a special markup language for saying, to computers that 'you' 'saw' 'something' 'here' 'on this day' -- turning internet information into sentences.

Semantic markup has great power (and great responsibility), but semantic eco-tagging seems beneficial for collecting citizen observations of invasive species as well as changing climatic conditions.

Observations show up on this
map

Spotter is a firefox plugin (tools > add-ons) which gives people who observe species the ability to create a semantically correct tag in comments and on web pages.

It's pretty easy to install it -- just add the plugin, and set up your location (tools > spotter options) -- they help you look up the scientific name related to your organism.

For Local Biology, I used my own user profile for my address.