Starting today, mammalwatching officially exists :-)

Vladimir Dinets, 12th March 2018, General Mammal Watching, 14

Our paper (with Jon Hall): Mammalwatching: A new source of support for science and conservation has just been published in IJBC. It’s open access: http://www.academicjournals.org/journal/IJBC/article-full-text-pdf/FBF3AD756278

14 Comments

Jim Tassano 4 years ago

Awesome!!!

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Peter Apps 4 years ago

Much food for thought there; if more species are on peoples’ want to see lists non-consumptive tourism could expand into areas where it is currently not financially viable, with subsequent benefits for habitat protection.

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Manul 4 years ago

Great! Awesome article.
Congratulations 🙂

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tomeslice 4 years ago

Great article!!
It’s funny I just recently had argument with a buddy about tiger ecotourism in India and I brought up all of these same arguments. I also added that (this is just a gut feeling) if animals are used to seeing people, and the people are watching them from safe distances and only taking pictures (not shooting them), then maybe they’re less likely to attack/eat people when they have unplanned interactions in villages or towns. And then people don’t go out to find the dangerous individual animals and killing it. But again, just a gut feeling….

Also, I was cited! Ha! That’s awesome, thank you.
Cheers!

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- Jon Hall 4 years ago
  
  Thanks Tomer. And that’s true for Elephants at least. Not so sure about predators though.
  
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Laurent Morin 4 years ago

Congratulations! This brings me hope.

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Cathy Pasterczyk 4 years ago

Excellent paper. Thanks!

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Author

Vladimir Dinets 4 years ago

Thanks everybody!

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Alan D 4 years ago

Great paper guys! Does anyone else use iNaturalist.org to log their mammal (and other critter) sightings? It’s the closest thing to ebird I have found.

Anyway, here’s to the continued growth of responsible Mammalwatching!

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- ryber 4 years ago
  
  I use iNat to record pretty much all my observations. In Australia verified (one other person agrees with the identification if theirs a photo) feeds into Atlas of Living Australia and GBIF.
  
  I am not great on the listing side but its pretty easy to get a life list of mammals – see here https://www.inaturalist.org/lists/63848-rybeavers-Life-List?iconic_taxon=40151 but not as easy as eBird for list of regions and the year, etc.
  
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Cathy PAsterczyk 4 years ago

Hi Alan D.

I too use eBird for recording birds. But I also import the data into IGOTERRA because it has some nice features that eBird does not have, in particular a “where to go next” feature.

I put everything in IGOTERRA but I also use iNaturalist to help me figure out critters that I do not know or have field guides for.

I have not figured out whether iNaturalist has many “listing” features. Does it?

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- Alan D 4 years ago
  
  Hi Cathy. I am not sure what you mean by “listing features”. iNaturalist is not as easy to use as ebird and searching the data isn’t as easy either but it is possible to view sightings based on estimated location (they allow people to hide actual locations on their submissions).
  
  Does that help?
  
  Alan
  
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Pierre van der Wielen 4 years ago

Another option to submit en check sightings of mammals (and anything else) is observation.org. It’s widely used in Europe and more and more outside as it’s very easy to use. The main disadvantage is that sightings of mammals popular by poachers are obscured. But that’s understandeble of course.

For a example see https://tinyurl.com/ybv2mf6w with my mammalsightings of last year.

Regards,
Pierre

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Catherine Pasterczyk 4 years ago

Alan D
Examples of listing features that I like include “what birds or mammals occur in Morocco (or whatever) that I have never seen anywhere” or “have I ever seen a Black Redstart”.
eBird is also great for learning where birds are on their migration.
Cathy

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