What is confirming?? When I heard that I would be confirming invasive species records – I thought to myself, what does that even mean? At the time, I didn’t really know what iMapInvasives was, other than I had the app and I could report these species. Soon, I learned that “confirming” meant looking at records that the public submits to iMapInvasives and verifying that it is indeed the species reported. I thought "how cool that would be!" Being a part of the process, contributing to our...

For this year’s NY Invasive Species Mapping Challenge, we tracked 5 species of concern ( new this year: Beech Leaf Disease Nematode! ). The main goal of the challenge is to map priority under-reported species to build our understanding of their distributions. Since there is so much ground (and water!) to cover in New York, we need the public’s help! We challenged partners, volunteers, and citizen scientists across the state to search for these five species during the month of July – and you...