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Bring your mobile and catch some wild relatives this summer

Date: 2018.06.21

According to Swedish tradition, the one who picks seven kinds of flowers and climbs over seven fences in the bright midsummers night will dream about their future spouse. But let’s update this tradition. Instead of picking the flowers, take a picture of them with your mobile and share it! This way you both learn more and help researchers.

iNaturalist is one of the world’s most popular nature apps, helping you to identify plant and animals in your surroundings. If you use the app and send in a picture of your findings along with the GPS-coordinates, you can join a community of over one million researchers and nature lovers who can teach you more about nature. The documentation at this platform also help researchers as they are given better data to work with.

– To get observations of where different kinds of plants are found is an immense help for us researchers. To gather this knowledge without the help of the public would take years, but now we get the data fast and in many different places. In return, we can give the finder some more information about the observation, says Anna Palmé, Senior Scientist with responsibility for NordGen’s participation in the project Crop Wild Relatives.

Food security in the future

Crop Wild Relatives, is an international project aiming to find wild relatives to our crop used for food and agriculture. These relatives could carry important treats needed in the future to secure our food production – as they might be the treats that allows the plant to thrive in a future changed climate or resist new plant diseases. Therefore, after you’ve downloaded the app iNaturalist, add the project Nordic Crop Wild Relatives.

– This way, the public’s observations can help us in the project, improve the conservation work of crop wild relatives and by extension contribute to securing a better readiness for our future food production, Anan Palmé says.

Better than dreaming

It’s told that the one picking flowers and climbing fences at the bright midsummers night will dream of their future spouse. But surely it must be a better win to know that you contribute to a more sustainable world?

Read more about iNaturalist here and download the app at places where you usually find apps! But don’t forget to add Nordic Crop Wild Relatives. This will help you find the name of your found species and join a community of like-minded amateur biologists, interested in crop wild relatives!