National Geographic’s Great Nature Project is an ongoing initiative that encourages direct exploration of nature by sharing photos of biodiversity from anywhere in the world. We especially encourage photos to be shared along with standardized information about what was observed, where, and when so the records can be used for scientific inquiry.
The Great Nature Project is more about biodiversity photography as documentation than for photographic quality, but we do like to highlight some of the most beautiful or interesting photos submitted, such as this collection of moths for National Moth Week. We especially want to encourage nature exploration for families, which is why we created a special biodiversity scavenger hunt about butterfly and moth life cycles.
In 2014, the Great Nature Project teamed up with iNaturalist to allow contributions directly from the Great Nature Project to be added to the iNaturalist database of biodiversity. Integrating directly with the iNaturalist community also allows people to add and receive identifications and comments related to other people’s observations as well as their own. The data structure created by iNaturalist facilitates recording observations in a standardized way that allows them to be further shared with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.
To contribute moth observations to the Great Nature Project, create an account (or sign in using an existing iNaturalist account) and upload observations at greatnatureproject.org. You can also contribute to the Great Nature Project using an iNaturalist Apple or Android app. All moth observations submitted to the Great Nature Project during National Moth Week will also be added to the National Moth Week project within iNaturalist.
National Moth Week 2015 (July 18-26) is just around the corner! Register a public or private event here.