Hello! A lot has happened since the last update to this project.
* We now have a webpage where you can learn more about One Tam, Peak Health, and the California Giant Salamander Inventory and see more instructions about contributing to the iNaturalist project: https://www.onetam.org/our-work/california-giant-salamander-inventory
* Thank you for sharing your observations with this project!!!! Dr. Lisette Arellano (aka @ten_salamanders) finished a report on the status of California Giant Salamanders for the latest update One Tam's Peak Health whitepaper. She was able to use many of the observations you shared to garner support for further investment in this species. Publication forthcoming some time in 2023.
* Please welcome our salamander interns Angel Meza-Cerna from City College of San Francisco and Bria Boose from San Francisco State University. We are grateful to the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy's Nina Robert's Academic Internship Program. Angel and Bria will be working on annotating and retrieving obscured California Giant Salamander observations from iNat. Our goal is to make a map of California Giant Salamander occurrences and to add data on age structure and salamander health. We will be working on a data/education project to share out later this summer.
Thanks again for your support! Go Giant Salamander!
Hello! The California Giant Salamander is a true icon of Mt. Tam. While we have some knowledge of their distribution, scientists and land managers at One Tam need more information to understand and protect them. This species was identified as a knowledge gap in our 2016 effort to understand the health of the mountain, called Peak Health. To help fill this gap, we are using crowd-sourced observations from iNaturalist.
By tagging you in this post, the One Tam Community Science Team would like to invite to join our Peak Health project on iNaturalist and share the obscured coordinates for your California Giant Salamander observation(s) in Marin County. https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/one-tam-peak-health
If you already joined, please make sure that you selected "yes" to one of the responses to "Trust with coordinates?"
You can learn more about this effort and see instructions on how to join the project and share your obscured coordinates:
https://www.onetam.org/our-work/california-giant-salamander-inventory
You can learn more about obscured coordinates and taxon geoprivacy here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#geoprivacy
Thank you!
Dr. Lisette Arellano (@ten_salamanders)
Senior Program Manager at the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy
If you have questions or comments you can email us at communityscience@onetam.org
One Tam is a partnership of the National Park Service, California State Parks, Marin County Parks, Marin Water, and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy
