Hello Oregon iNaturalists!

You’ve joined our project, and now you may be trying to figure out how to add your observations. There are a number of ways to “Batch Add” your existing iNaturalist observations to the project. Here is one option that allows you to add up to 200 of your observations at a time:

1. Navigate to your observations
2. select "Edit Observations"
3. click "Batch Edit”
4. click "Select All"
5. click "Add to Project"
6. choose Add for "Oregon Wildlife Conservation" in the drop down menu

You may also be asking why you need to take action to add your observations – some other projects do it automatically! As the agency in charge of monitoring and managing sensitive species in Oregon, ODFW is especially interested in spatial data for sensitive wildlife species. To protect this sensitive data, iNaturalist requires that users actively choose who they make these data available to. Data for sensitive species (threatened, endangered, sensitive, or otherwise vulnerable) have an obscured geoprivacy setting. This means that the locations of these observations are displayed as a random point within an area of almost 400km² at our latitude. To protect this sensitive data, iNaturalist requires that users actively choose who they make these data available to. Obscured data does not provide the precision that ODFW needs in order to accurately monitor the presence and distribution of these species. The Oregon Wildlife Conservation project is a tool that allows iNaturalists to choose to share their spatial data for these species with us.

As you add more wildlife observations in Oregon, don’t forget to add them to our project! You can also set your membership in the project up to allow us to add your observations to the project directly.

If you run into any problems, please reach out through our iNaturalist account or direct to our email ODFW.iNaturalist@state.or.us for help.

Stay tuned for some further journal articles that describe how your sensitive species data can contribute to ongoing projects that help ODFW protect these species!

Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing your observations

Help wildlife stay connected!

Many species rely on the ability to move throughout the landscape to fulfill their daily and seasonal needs for access to food, shelter, and opportunities to reproduce. Human changes to the landscape often restrict the ability of wildlife to move by adding barriers, inducing changes in their behavior, impacting critical migration stopover sites, and increasing habitat fragmentation. The Oregon Connectivity Assessment and Mapping Project (OCAMP) aims to link landscapes for wildlife by identifying habitat connectivity throughout the state for 54 of Oregon’s native wildlife species.

How You Can Help

In particular, there are ten species that have very few observations in the state, and we need your help to find out where they are:

1. North American Porcupine
2. Black-tailed Jackrabbit
3. Ord’s Kangaroo Rat
4. Northern Alligator Lizard
5. Western Rattlesnake
6. American Pika
7. Bushy-tailed Woodrat
8. Mountain Goat
9. Long-nosed Leopard Lizard
10. Northern Flying Squirrel

Observation data helps us identify where species are in the state, and where they’re moving! We’ll be using observations collected by iNaturalist users to validate our connectivity maps. The more observations we have for a given species, the more confident we can be that the maps we produce will be useful for species conservation. You can help us by sharing photos of any of the 54 OCAMP species. Exploring Oregon’s forests, meadows, and peaks to find where these species are is an important mission, and we can’t do it alone!