The Club’s goal is to support and engage in the study and conservation of the biodiversity of Western Australia and the wider natural environment. In the past, and still our main mode of operation is to write excursion reports and submit species lists with them for the Club’s archives. However, in our digital era we know that there are better ways to share our observations and become better citizen scientists. The Club has started projects on iNaturalist Australia since 2020 as a way to share our observations with the wider community, partly to discuss what we have observed, partly to get expert opinions on identification, and in the end contribute to the Atlas of Living Australia. Most people nowadays use their mobile phone to snap images of plants and animals. It is but a small step to upload them to iNaturalist Australia so the wider public can benefit from our observations. We would still like to track our records and I have therefore set up a project called WA Naturalists’ Club members’ observations (https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/projects/wa-naturalists-club-members-observations). You can add your observations to this project for any natural history observations in Western Australia.

Alternatively, you can set up a project specifically for an excursion and add your observations to that project (or I can assist you with that). I have set up an umbrella project that can link all our individual excursion projects together, which is called WA Naturalists’ Club (https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/projects/wa-naturalists-club). Four projects are currently linked under this, one for Yunderup observations, two Bioblitz projects, and the WA Naturalists’ Club members’ observations project. The total observations from these three projects is 1,349 with more than 1,000 species recorded by 23 observers. We ask you to join the members’ observation project to build further on our observations.

Jolanda