Conservation statistics like habitat loss and extinction rates are often too abstract to resonate with people. Caring about a number requires more effort than a scrolling thumb is willing to give. Save the Newts - The Volunteer Effect/ game by Karan Gathani Games like Newt Crosser and Save the Newts (in 2D and 3D) change this by making the situation personal. When you are the one moving an amphibian across a dark road, the stakes become real. In Save the Newts, you see the larger picture:...

Smartphone apps make our life easier also in the field. This is a quick summary of some of our favorite apps and how we use them: iNaturalist This is the main app we use at our BioBlitz events and everything else! It's a free smartphone app, used by millions of people worldwide. It's a social media network for nature nerds, allowing us to share observations of any living organism we come across (and dead things too!). The app uses AI to compare photos to nearby observations and suggests...

On Wednesday 1/21/26 we hosted our 12th Naturalist Training Series webinar. Our wonderful experts, Damon Tighe, JJ Johnson, and Alison Pollack , presented about mushrooms, lichens, and slime molds. You can view the webinar recording here , and the entire series here . In this blog post, I will present a few ideas, suggestions, and screen shots (with permission) from the webinar. I hope you'll find these useful. I always wanted to learn more about these three groups of organisms, and for a few...