Much of what we have learned about the biodiversity of the Angela Dandini Garden has been through the help of citizen scientists.

Our primary tool for documenting plants, animals, and fungi is iNaturalist. We recommend you download the free app on your phone and make observations by uploading photos of species you observe! 

iNaturalist is a global network of citizen scientists, naturalists, and biologists who document and share observations of species. It's okay if you don't know what species you are looking at- iNaturalist will provide suggestions and those familiar with the species will provide or verify the identity for you. Observations are made my taking photos or recording sounds.

The most important part of making an observation is to ensure you have many in-focus photos of the organism, including both close-up and entire organism shots. If the photos are blurry or the organism is not discernable, then may not be possible for anyone to identify the organism, and the observation is not usable. Here's a guide to taking quality photos and other iNaturalist tutorials: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/video+tutorials  

(and here are some more tips for making useful observations: https://www.inaturalist.org/people/tmessick)