CNDDB News Blog

Happy April, all! This month brings a very special day, International Bat Appreciation Day! Spring has sprung and as hibernation comes to an end, bats can be seen feeding on insects returning to the state. This means April is an opportune time to observe them. Because their diet consists mainly of insects, bats are crucial to California’s fragile farming industry. The California Natural Diversity Database currently tracks 21 of the 25 bat species that inhabit California and holds over 2,800 mapped occurrences! With the spread of white-nose syndrome and recorded cases of the disease in Washington state, protecting California’s bat species is more important than ever. Want to contribute to the monitoring of these awesome critters? Have you seen some of these species in your area? If so, submit your observations through our Online Field Survey Form!

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!