Here’s a way to link observations and determine a flower species if you don’t know it. You see a butterfly visiting a flower. Take a photo of the flower and plant and add it to iNaturalist. Then, use the computer vision there and other naturalists to help you ID the plant. Add a full link to the plant to the comments for your butterfly observation in eButterfly. Like this:
I like the idea of linking butterflies to the plants they use. Thanks for the tip.
We are planning on adding the capability to eButterfly soon to record flower species visit and host plants when encountered. But for now, this works fine using iNat too.
In iNaturalist, I (almost) always enter an Annotation for “visited the flower of” when I know it, especially if the flower is a clear part of the ID photo. Will the future eButterfly process be able to pick that up from past iNaturalist observations?
iNaturalist and eButterfly are completely separate databases and platforms. That said, the place where they are joined together with all of the world’s biodiversity data in a standardized format called Darwin Core is a place called GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. We rely on this amazing place 110% for the Vermont Atlas of Life project and we provide a lot of data to GBIF. You can think of GBIF as like the UN for biodiversity in a way. Many of our tools at VAL and for the atlas use data pipelines we created to hit GBIF, like our block mapper tool or the flight time chart on the VBA2 web site.