Cascade Volcanoes • Entered by Laurie Kerr on January 16, 2020
Wild Spotter Webinar
January 14, 2020
Participants and Hours
| Pre Planning hours | |
| Post Admin hours | 0.5 |
| Activity Hours | 1 |
| Participants | 1 |
| Total Hours | 1.5 |
Key Issue: Public Lands Health & Protection
Activity Type: Trainings (WALTS, CAREs/GLOWs, research, conferences, workshops, etc.)
Key Partners: National Wilderness Stewardship Alliance
Short Description of Activity
Chuck Bargeron from the University of Georgia along with USFS and Wildlife Forever hosted the webinar. The purpose of the WildSpotter App is to use volunteers to monitor invasive species, particularly in wilderness and tribal lands. Gifford Pinchot National Forest will be launched soon.
The national website has information on it on top of Edmaps platform. Priority areas for WildSpotter include wilderness and wild and scenic river areas to provide a list of invasive species noted. It includes education along with data collection tools. The difference between WildSpotter and INaturalist is that INaturalist is more general and WildSpotter is an educational tool with information about the invasive species.
It also includes a Bingo game on their website which might be fun at a meeting or party. Posters are also included and can be put up at TH as well as brought out for tabling events. The posters are paired with boot brushes at trailheads to educate the public about invasive species seen on that trail. There is a connection between climate change and invasive species in that, as temperature increases, the extent of the range of the invasives also increases. You can use the Edmark map of the species and see where species are expected to increase and compare it to where it is now to measure the effects of climate change on a species. Also use the range expansion maps on the county maps. These regional expansions of invasives will become much larger as time goes on. It is critical to do something about invasives before they expand into their expected range.
Reflection/Evaluation
The Wild Spotter is a neat tool but, until we get Gifford Pinchot national forest on the app, it is not much use to us now. However, when I emailed Randy about the webinar, he thanked me for our service from our broadband and told me he had much more grant money to give away in the coming months, suggesting he wanted to fund us again! That was the best part of the webinar!