Environmental education center IslandWood hosted its 21st Nature Counts! conference April 13, hosting over 50 people and 11 organizations for a day of nature exploration, learning and sharing the ecology of the Kitsap Peninsula.

In addition to talks from Christina Woolf, senior naturalist at IslandWood, and Megan Rohrssen, community education manager at the BI Land Trust, local experts representing nearly every kingdom of life brought props and led attendees on themed nature walks. The Kitsap Peninsula Mycological Society spotted mushrooms, Kitsap Audubon spied birds, “The Bumblers” from Washington State University Extension looked for insects and macro-invertebrates, the Bloedel Reserve checked out plants and IslandWood and the Woodland Park Zoo investigated herpetofauna, or reptiles and amphibians.

The event is part-research summit for local naturalists, part pep rally for the 10th City Nature Challenge: a friendly three-day competition between cities and regions around the world to record the most flora, fauna and fungi in their area. Between April 25-28, citizens are encouraged to go outside and document any living thing they see in the wild using iNaturalist, a nature identification app created by the California Academy of Sciences.

“In terms of community science data, these are the four most valuable days of the whole year,” said Alison Young, co-director of community science at the Cal Academy and event co-founder. “This week consistently has the greatest number of wildlife observations on iNaturalist out of the year—all of which are free and accessible. From monitoring endangered, common, and invasive species to simply documenting what’s in your own backyard, all of this data contributes to our collective understanding of urban biodiversity and helps conservation managers and decision-makers identify which species and places to protect.”

In 2024, more than 83,000 people recorded over 2.4 million observations during the global “bioblitz”, with the highest number of observations tallied in La Paz, Bolivia, where 3,593 participants made more than 165,000 observations over a weekend.

There’s no prize for winning, but that’s never stopped Woolf. Since joining iNaturalist, she’s catalogued hundreds of species, learned the ecology of dozens and her observations have been tapped by several scientists and projects.

“These things happen just by using the app. Even just from my own intellectual delight and being able to learn more about the ecology of where I live — that, in itself, is a huge reward to me as a naturalist. But knowing that I could be informing conservation practices, that just made me feel like, ‘Wow — little things like that help contribute to a valuable body of scientific knowledge that we can utilize to make conservation and land use decisions.’ My lens is that everyday people can do extraordinary things.”

iNaturalist has become an essential resource for researchers in understudied areas, Woolf added. The app’s verification system allows scientists to crowdsource accurate information about a species, complete with location data, that may otherwise be incredibly challenging and costly to acquire.

Sometimes, a single observation can change an entire forest.

Woolf once snapped a picture of a salamander she hadn’t seen before on a hike in Olympic National Forest. She uploaded the observation to iNaturalist, which helped her nail down a species identification: a Van Dyke’s salamander. Within a week, she was contacted by a biologist from the state Forest Service: that species had not been seen on the east side of the Olympic Peninsula for about 20 years, he said, and only existed in a handful of locations throughout Western Washington.

Community science on Bainbridge has had far-reaching impacts, too.

At Nature Counts!, Maradel Gale of Sustainable Bainbridge awarded the Bainbridge Island Environmental Conference’s “Environmentalist of the Year” designation to Tom and Kathy Hansen of Fort Ward, whose monitoring of the Cooke aquaculture farms in Rich Passage provided supporting evidence for a statewide ban on netpen finfish aquaculture in Washington state.

In May 2016, the Hansens watched the company flout environmental regulations and started taking records of the company’s actions, including powerwashing nets and polluting the area. In 2017, a Cooke netpen broke near Cypress Island in Skagit County, releasing 260,000 Atlantic salmon into Puget Sound — an enormous environmental disaster that pushed legislators to ban non-native species from aquaculture.

Cooke switched to steelhead, but the company’s hazardous practices didn’t end there, and in 2022, the state cancelled the company’s last two leases in Puget Sound.

“I have lived on Bainbridge Island near the net pens for 10 years and have experienced several owners. Since Cooke has taken ownership, their practices have been the worst of the lot. I have personally witnessed Cooke’s water quality violations for which they have been fined and the incredible effort that was required to hold Cooke accountable for its actions,” said Tom Hansen in a public comment. “Cooke is not the local, sustainable, and good-neighbor company that they try to frame as their public image. They are a multi-billion-dollar company that exploits public water for profit. They are ‘hell bent’ on expansion and take shortcuts to achieve greater profits.”

Efforts like the Hansens aside, it surprised Woolf to discover that the Kitsap Peninsula and Bainbridge are missing historical ecological data on whole taxa, despite being home to many scientists and near many research universities.

The areas’ rare natural resources, like clean freshwater streams and wetlands, prairies and bluffs, could hold treasures of biodiversity that are yet unknown, but may shape the region, including the people who live there. Ecological data can inform not just conservation, but all land use decisions, by providing answers to questions like, “What is the dollar value of this forest cleaning our water, versus a new wastewater treatment facility?”

“There’s no economy for just knowing for knowing’s sake,” Woolf said. “It’s groups like BILT, the state and local agencies, who are the archivists of this information. We know that the island is one island — all these systems overlap and affect the health of everything — and it’s so nice that we’ll have all this collaboration and sharing of resources to get that baseline down, because people need to know what ecological value looks like.”