CNDDB News Blog

This past weekend was Citizen Science Day! We’d like to take this opportunity to celebrate all the scientists and nature enthusiasts from the public who are out there collecting valuable data that would otherwise be overlooked. The CNDDB wants to utilize the power of citizen science, so we have launched our own iNaturalist project.

iNaturalist is an online platform and mobile application that allows users to record and share observations of organisms. It also serves as a social network for crowdsourcing species identification and connecting an extensive network of citizen scientists. The CNDDB created its own iNaturalist project primarily to gain access to precise coordinate locations, since the locations of most species we track are obscured by iNaturalist users or the program itself in order to protect the species. It is important to note that using iNaturalist isn’t a substitute for filling out our CNDDB field survey forms. The CNDDB field survey forms were designed to collect specific data that would meet the reporting requirements which many professional biologists and those working under a special permit are held to. If you are an iNaturalist user, please consider joining our iNaturalist project and opting in to sharing the specific location information of your rare species detections with us!

California is a biodiversity hotpot. A large part of California’s biodiversity is a result of the exceptional number of native plant species in the state. California currently boasts over 6,500 native plant taxa with about 30% of those plants occurring nowhere else in the world. In conjunction with the large number of native plants in California comes a large number of rare plants as well. The CNDDB currently tracks nearly 2,400 rare plant taxa.

To celebrate this amazing array of botanical diversity, the California State Legislature designated the third week of April to be California Native Plant Week. See the California Native Plant Society website for activities in your area or simply venture outside for a hike to take in and appreciate all the native plant diversity California has to offer!

The quarterly update of the Barred Owl Observations Database is available in the BIOS Viewer for CNDDB Subscribers. The barred owl database includes barred owl (Strix varia), Strix hybrid, and unknown Strix detections.

Many of the records represent incidental detections made during spotted owl surveys; therefore, this dataset may not accurately represent the current distribution of barred owls in California. Furthermore, this dataset is only available to CNDDB subscribers because it contains references to sensitive spotted owl locations. A public version will be available in the future.

For a copy of the geodatabase or for site-specific inquiries, contact the database manager at owlobs@wildlife.ca.gov.