About What’s Invasive!
Our (constantly being updated system) What’s Invasive! currently supports citizen science campaigns for locating invasive weeds.
Invasive weeds are a significant threat to native plants and animals. Although most non-natives are not considered “invasive”, those that crowd out food sources for wild animals, create erosion, or act as a greater fire hazard can be considered a threat and need to be identified and located for removal. You can help!
We are making the What’s Invasive! system global in reach but local for identifying and locating weeds.
With the current online What’s Invasive! system, any National Park Service official (or other authorized person) can create a park-specific weed list, with descriptions and photos uploaded to our server. Once the weed list is finished and authorized, then all Android phones running the What’s Invasive! application will be able to download this list and the phone is ready to help in identifying and locating these species. All the data collected by the users of the phones are uploaded to the server and are immediately available to anyone for downloading as a CSV file.
An iPhone application with the same capabilities is coming soon! (currently our iPhone app only supports the Santa Monica National Recreation Area).
The What’s Invasive! Android app automatically picks the weed list associated with the nearest location to the user. In this way, we can have nation-wide coverage with weed lists that are targeted to specific regions. It is also very easy, however, to turn off this automatic selection and manually choose a weed list.
We already have expanded from our pilot park in Santa Monica to include the Channel Islands in California, Rock Creek Park in Washington DC, and with the help of one of our Danish graduate students, Denmark (“Danmark” in Danish), to show off the system to a group of Europeans.
We have found that partnering with NPS officials and groups such as schools and running short-term “campaigns” has been very effective in not only education-related efforts but also in identifying and locating weeds.