The easiest way to add observations is by using your phone. Follow the instructions in the help guides at iNaturalist. Download the app to your phone, create a user account and you are ready to go. Make sure location settings are on for your phone when you take a picture of your observation. When you have a good picture share it with iNaturalist and the app will guide you through submitting your report.
You do not have to know exactly what the animal, plant, fish or insect is. You can guess or just add animal, plant or even "something" to describe it. The community in iNaturalist will often help in identifying your observation.
Hover over the iNaturalist project tab to enable the links to the home page and the help guide.
What is iNaturalist?
iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature
It's also a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool. You can use it to record your own observations, get help with identifications, collaborate with others to collect this kind of information for a common purpose, or access the observational data collected by iNaturalist users.
However, despite the fact that iNat can be a bit technical and seems scientific, our primary goal in operating iNaturalist is to connect people to nature, and by that we mean getting people to feel that the non-human world has personal significance, and is worth protecting. We have a pretty nerdy way of doing that, of course, but we really believe that recording information about nature in a social context is a tremendous way to understand the awesome depth and breadth of life on Earth.
Our secondary goal is to generate scientifically valuable biodiversity data from these personal encounters. We believe iNat can achieve both of these goals simultaneously - in fact that they reinforce one another - but when we get pulled in conflicting directions, we measure success by our primary goal. If we connect people to nature without contributing to any specific scientific outcomes or quantifiable conservation results, then we're still doing our job, but if we just contribute to science without helping people care about the natural world, we’ll be on the wrong track.
CITU is interested in learning about what you observe along the tailwater. Insects, fish, plants and anything living you encounter on your day at the tailwater. We are currently working on a project map which will outline the tailwater boundary and include the park as well.
CITU has no control over the information you submit. We are hoping to get everyone excited about being outside and observing nature while they fish, play or picnic at the tailwater.
If you just don't want to bother with all that but want to send a picture our way we will post it to the site. Send the picture to browntrout@centralindianatu.org and we will add it for you.