A Barred Owl perches on a street sign. @rebelgirl73
Congratulations to iNaturalist user @rebelgirl73 for winning the January 2025 Photo-observation of the Month for the Vermont Atlas of Life on iNaturalist! Her photo of a Barred Owl perched on a street sign received the most faves of any iNaturalist observation in Vermont during the past month.
The Barred Owl is native to eastern North America, though it is now widespread across North America all the way to the west coast, where it is considered invasive. In Vermont, the Barred Owl is the species of owl most frequently encountered by people due to its large and healthy population. Some other owls found in Vermont are Great Horned Owls, Northern Saw-whet Owls, Eastern Screech Owls, Long-eared Owls, and the occasional Short-Eared Owl, Northern Hawk Owl, and Snowy Owl.
On iNaturalist, you might notice that some Barred Owls spotted in Vermont have been identified and labeled as Northern Barred Owls, one of several subspecies of Barred Owl listed on the platform (along with Texas Barred Owl and Florida Barred Owl). Because these Barred Owls were spotted in Vermont and there’s only one subspecies found here, it’s pretty safe to assume that they fall into the Northern Barred Owl subspecies.
But this raises another question: How much does identifying the subspecies on iNaturalist matter? Questions like this are enough to make the average community scientist’s head turn 270°. Taxonomic classifications matter a lot if you’re looking at two entirely separate species with similar names, such as Short-eared Owl and Long-eared Owl, but matter less if you’re looking at the differentiation between a species and its subspecies, like Northern Saw-whet Owl and its subspecies Mainland Northern Saw-whet Owl, or Barred Owl and Northern Barred Owl. So, identifying a Barred Owl in Vermont as simply “Barred Owl” isn’t wrong, nor is identifying it more specifically as a “Northern Barred Owl.” The beauty of iNaturalist as a platform is that when in doubt about IDing your observation, you can make your best guess based on your level of knowledge, and other community scientists can add their IDs to help independently verify the species or subspecies. When confirming another scientist’s observation, though, you shouldn’t guess at all.
Speaking of species identification, one of our goals for 2025 is to reach 1 million Research Grade observations on the Vermont Atlas of Life project on iNaturalist. Currently, the project has 1.4 million records on iNaturalist, but fewer than 880,000 of those observations are “Research Grade.” Once observations have been uploaded, they need to be independently identified and verified by other users. It’s called crowd-sourced identification; as more people identify a photograph or sound, the identification’s accuracy typically increases. Only these verified data can be used for research and conservation. That’s where community scientists like you come in! You can make a difference in conservation just by verifying iNaturalist observations. Add your identifications to observations that are labeled as “Needs ID” now!
With 1,738 observations submitted by 383 observers in January, it was a great month. Click on the image above to see and explore all of the amazing observations.
Visit the Vermont Atlas of Life on iNaturalist where you can vote for the winner this month by clicking the ‘fave’ star on your favorite photo-observation. Make sure you get outdoors and record the biodiversity around you, then submit your discoveries and you could be a winner!
