I'm a retired research professor of biology from the University of New Mexico. My educational background is in Botany and Ecology. My expertise is in environmental informatics and my current research interest is on data integrity and reproducability. I'm a wilderness fanatic in the vein of Thoreau and Roosevelt and spend all available time with my kids in the wild. Long term studies are critical to understanding patterns in the live world and simple observation and phenology studies done by regular folks can provide valuable insights. That's why I've been using iNaturalist.org for keeping my personal observations so that they can be used by others rather than just providing an outlet for my field biologists persona.