A team of botanists, including JRS grantees from the Missouri Botanical Garden and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, took Analamazoatra/Perinet Reserve by storm during a botanical bio-blitz. Following a few intensive training sessions with the Android version of iNaturalist, including a guest lecture from iNaturalist Co Director, Scott Loarie, the group divided into teams and set out to digitally capture every plant they could. They even discovered the true purpose of a selfie stick: to capture observations of hard-to-reach plants!

The trip yielded 600 observations of 100 species, bringing the iNaturalist records for Madagascar to 1,000 species and 2,000 records, one of the greatest densities of observations in Africa. Having Scott Loarie in attendance was a particular perk, because it offered inspiration about how adding offline functionality to the app could benefit usage in areas with low internet availability. Read about it on the Zavamaniry Gasy Journal.iNaturalist observations for Africa. The particularly high density of records in Madigascar has been supported by several JRS-funded projects