Happy spring everyone! Oh wait…
Just kidding, but you could have fooled me. Sunday was almost t-shirt weather. And I’m not the only one who felt spring in the air. This weekend, I noticed a flurry of insect activity both inside my house and beyond. Many insects who usually hunker down in the cracks of my house decided to take advantage of the warm weather to forage and stretch their wings.
While some of us may enjoy a break from winter’s icy grip, unusual warm spells can cause problems for wildlife. In some cases, unusually warm weather can cause species that rely on temperature cues to emerge too soon, leaving them vulnerable to starvation and freezing if temperatures plummet. In other instances, phenological mismatch can occur when temperature-dependent food sources emerge before daylight-dependent species become active.
As weather and temperature patterns become increasingly erratic, the consequences to different species will become more pronounced. However, tools like iNaturalist are a real game changer. By tapping into iNaturalist’s vast network of citizen scientists, professionals tackling these issues can monitor how species respond and develop conservation plans to support species as their surrounding environment changes.
This Week on Tech Tip Tuesday
Besides monitoring species, iNaturalist is also well known for its role in helping people learn how to identify the life around them. However, we can all use a little outside help from time to time. Maybe there’s a particular species of fern that has the automatic identification stumped. Or maybe you want to confirm that someone’s suggested identification is correct. Regardless of your needs, there are plenty of resources to help you identify the plants, animals, and fungi you encounter in your travels.
Below is a sample of the Vermont Atlas of Life team’s go-to resources.
Birds:
Sibley Guides and Apps
Merlin Bird ID
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service – The Feather Atlas
Botany:
GoBotany
The Sibley Guide to Trees
Entomology:
BugGuide
Moth Photographers Group
Flower Fly genera
Lady Beetles
Bee genera
Wasps
Butterflies
Introduced Species:
USGS Nonindigenous Invasive Species
iMap Invasives
General:
Discover Life
TTT Task of the Week
Take some time this week to explore any of the unfamiliar resources listed above. See if you can find some new favorites. I also invite you to comment down below or email me directly with your own favorite resources. Let’s see if we can get a big list going that people can turn to when they need help!
Thank you for helping us map Vermont’s biodiversity and happy observing!
Comentarios
Thanks for sharing these resources!
First my question - what are good resources for learning grasses, sedges and rushes in Vermont?
And now, a couple of my favorite resources:
For learning to identify trees year round:
A Beginner's Guide to Recognizing Trees of the Northeast by Mark Mikolas
Bark by Michael Wojtech
For ferns, I have found the - Peterson Field Guide for Ferns of Northeastern and Central North America - helpful.
For wildflowers, Newcomb's Wildflower Guide.
For Vermont Invasives, https://vtinvasives.org/.
And a top favorite for learning about natural communities in Vermont.
Wetland, Woodand, Wildland by Thompson, Sorenson and Zaino
:-) W.B.
Here is a sedge resource: http://northernforestatlas.org/2016/01/26/sedge-digital-atlas/
I haven't played with it yet, but it looks great!
@wendelyns I don't know of any grass, rush, or sedge resources for Vermont, but the recently published guide to Grasses and Rushes of Maine (https://www.amazon.com/Grasses-Arsenault-Cameron-Doucette-Mittelhauser/dp/0891011293) is extremely thorough and there is likely a good amount of species overlap between the two states. There is also a very nice Sedge guide for Maine (https://www.amazon.com/Sedges-Maine-Field-Guide-Cyperaceae/dp/0891011234)
@wendelyns, I’m a Plant Conservation Volunteer for Native Plant Trust so it’s worth my while to own more references than most, and have chosen to attempt to learn the sedges, too. I went so far as to take Tony Reznicek’s Sedge Course at Eagle Hill. He’s a world class sedge expert. His advice was to pick a key you want to work with and keep IDing/learning with it. Sedges of Maine book (great photos for each species but VT has enough additional sedges that it can be inadequate for some) with its photos is super helpful. Art Gilman’s New Flora of VT’s strength is it is limited to VT species but heavier to carry into the field. Flora Novae Angliae, the printed version of the GoBotany key, is the lightest, most thorough to carry into the field, but it has ALL of New England’s sedges. No perfect book. And Jerry Jenkins, as mentioned by @beeboy, has some new “anti-key” approaches in his printed books and online work which cover most of the common sedges and if you are open to a different approach, his photos and diagrams are awesome. Good luck! It’s practice, practice, practice. Carex is our most populated species, not to mention it’s amazing cousins. Re: Grasses, try the Grasses and Rushes of Maine book (again, it’s got photos for all species). Also there is Dennis Magee’s Grasses of the Northeast, but I haven’t invested time yet in either.
@beeboy @nsharp @kkruesi Thank you everyone for the suggestions. I look forward to trying them out next summer. (Pretty amazing photos at http://northernforestatlas.org/, a new site for me.)
Thanks everyone for wonderful comments and discussion. I was thinking that perhaps we should make a web page on the VAL web site where we could keep all this with links and more and keep updating it. Then we could have a link on the VAL iNat project front page to it. We all could keep adding resources to it as we encounter them. Good idea?
Great idea!
Yes, that would be very helpful!
Ditto!
Hi everyone, and thanks, Emily, for all of your Tech Tips! Here are just a few of my favorite resources. I don't do Amazon, but all of the old books are available at reasonable prices through my favorite used-book vendor, Alibris.com, though there are other good used-book vendors out there, too. As for new books, I find them from a smaller business, non-profit, or publisher (for example, I got New Flora of Vermont from UPNE, Sedges of Maine from the Maine Natural History Observatory, and Jerry Jenkins' Sedges of the Northern Forest directly from The Northern Forest Atlas). Anyway, here goes:
Birds’ Nests
Headstrom, Richard. 1949. Birds' Nests A Field Guide. New York: Ives Washburn, Inc. (yes, there's Peterson, which I also use, but this one offers an elegant little key)
Odonates (all are recommendations that I gleaned from Michael Blust, Josh Lincoln, and Bryan Pfeiffer -- they mentioned other resources, but these are the three I chose, and they're all excellent):
Jones, Colin D., et al. 2013. Field Guide to the Dragonflies and Damselflies of Algonquin Park and the Surrounding Area. Whitney, Ontario: Friends of Algonquin Park.
Lam, Ed. 2004. Damselflies of the Northeast a Guide to the Species of Eastern Canada & the Northeastern United States. Forest Hills, NY: Biodiversity Books.
Nikula, Blair, et al. 2003. A Field Guide to the Dragonflies and Damselflies of Massachusetts. Westborough, MA: Natural Heritage Endangered Species Program.
Also available online at: https://archive.org/details/fieldguidetodrag00niku/page/n1
Vascular Plants of Vermont
Gilman, Arthur V. 2015. New Flora of Vermont. Bronx, NY: New York Botanical Garden Press. (pricey but priceless!)
Wildflowers and Flowering Shrubs and Vines of Northeastern and North-central North America
Newcomb, Lawrence. 1977. Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. (a classic and a field must, but works only if you've got a flower)
And here are links to a 2010 taxonomy update:
https://www.nyflora.org/current-projects/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kbhzZy1xjNDE7VS_WqqrswkcPDqdD_5DM8Fv4kEA44o/preview
Woody Plants
Core, Earl L. and Nelle P. Ammons. 1958, reprinted with corrections 1973. Woody Plants in Winter A Manual of Common Trees and Shrubs in Winter in the Northeastern United States and Southeastern Canada. Pacific Grove, CA: The Boxwood Press.
Harlow, William M., PhD. 1941. Fruit Key and Twig Key to Trees and Shrubs (Fruit Key to Northeastern Trees and Twig Key to the Deciduous Woody Plants of Eastern North America). New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
Grasses
Brown, Lauren. 1979. Grasses An Identification Guide. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. (Covers grasses of the Northeast, shown in book’s range map, from eastern Minnesota east and northern Kentucky north and east through Maine)
Cyperaceae (I find it helpful to use both resources together.)
Arsenault, Matt, et al. 2013. Sedges of Maine A Field Guide to Cyperaceae. Orono, ME: The University of Maine Press.
Jenkins, Jerry. 2019. Sedges of the Northern Forest A Photographic Guide. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Bryophytes/Mosses
Pope, Ralph. 2016. Mosses, Liverworts, and Hornworts A Field Guide to Common Bryophytes of the Northeast. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
McKnight, Karl B., et al. 2013. Common Mosses of the Northeast and Appalachians. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Best to you all,
Charlotte
We started to compile everyone's suggestions and placed them on a web page at the Vermont Atlas of Life. There is now a link to it from our iNaturalist page. Go to our project page and on the right hand side bar, there's a link just below the "about'. Keep your new resources coming and we'll add them!
Wow! Absolutely impressive! Thanks!
cb
Thanks!
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