If you have full access to the journal Nature, you’ll be able to read Jonathan Silvertown’s correspondence about a pet project called iSpot. Silvertown says:
Through social networking, the identification process can be made more efficient while simultaneously spreading real taxonomic knowledge. The facility is available to anyone, unlike other technologies that require specialized equipment.
In its first year of operation, the website … helped 6,000 users to identify 25,000 sightings of some 2,500 species, from lichens to birds. The website works by linking experts (including amateur experts) with beginners through a sophisticated reputation system that encourages users to help and learn from each other.
This, Silvertown says, is “social networking on the Internet”. ((And yes, there is something delicious about promoting the virtues of the social networking behind a paywall.))
And it is, of a sort. Not the sort that we’ve championed here more than once, most famously in connection with some globetrotting taro. It is good that people can get good identification of things they’ve seen, and been able to photograph. My argument with iSpot is that it perpetuates the dichotomy between nature and agriculture, probably unconsciously, although very directly: “your place to share nature”.
So, while you will find crop wild relatives in there, there is no mention of the fact that that is what they are. You won’t find a single entry for Triticum. And so, while there may be lots of discussions of willow warblers vs chiffchaffs, the essential and fundamental differences between the raw materials of beer and bread go unremarked. And where would all those twitchers be without a sandwich and a pint?
Silvertown clearly knows about and cares about agriculture, and is not afraid to use agricultural examples in his teaching and popular writing. I wish he had extended that to his Citizen Science projects.
And while I’m moaning, where’s the site that will allow anyone anywhere to upload a photograph of a crop direct from a mobile phone and get it identified, preferably to variety level?