New way to track sightings of wildlife in Acadia National Park

If you’ve ever taken photos of wildlife in Acadia National Park – whether of turkeys, a barred owl, a butterfly, a porcupine or a snapping turtle – and wanted to share it with the world, not just with family and friends, there’s a new online citizen science project to allow you to do just that.

When we saw this flock of wild turkeys near Acadia National Park’s Sieur de Monts entrance, we had to stop and take a photo. We just uploaded this photo to Anecdata.org. (C) MDIBL, Anecdata and contributors

“Wildlife Sightings in Acadia National Park” is the name of the project, which we here at Acadia on My Mind just created on Anecdata.org, the online citizen science portal by the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory’s Community Environmental Health Lab.

While there have been ways to upload sightings in Acadia of birds like Snowy owls, to the online database eBird, we haven’t found a way to keep track of other Acadia wildlife sightings. That’s why we decided to start this wildlife sightings project.

From butterflies to barred owls, porcupines to snapping turtles

Maybe this wildlife in Acadia project could help track not only current sightings in the park, but also wildlife over the last 100 years. We may add this project to our application to become an Acadia Centennial Partner, to help document a century’s worth of wildlife in Acadia, referencing historic surveys, as well as wildlife sightings contributed by the citizen scientists of today.

Won’t you consider contributing to Acadia on My Mind’s science project? It’s easy to do, as we wrote about when first describing Anecdata’s snapping turtle project. You’ll want to be aware of the site’s terms of service, and that each photo you upload is subject to a Creative Commons license.

Embedded below are some of the 9 photos of wildlife in Acadia National Park that we’ve already uploaded to the project. To link to the data for each photo, such as date and place taken, or species name, go here.

As we go through our photo files, we’ll be adding some more wildlife shots. What’s in your photo files?

4 thoughts on “New way to track sightings of wildlife in Acadia National Park”

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Jeanette Matlock August 31, 2015 at 10:08 am

Thanks for the info. I will be uploading my buck photo taken in Oct. 2014 & a woodpecker photo from Oct 2013. Love those rare & special moments when the wild animals choose to reveal themselves.

Acadia on my mind Post authorAugust 31, 2015 at 12:33 pm

Hi Jeanette, you’re inspiring us to put some of our other wildlife photos up, such as the Spruce grouse we saw earlier this year. Thanks for contributing! Will also give us another reason to invite others to add their Acadia wildlife photos to the citizen science database.