Doing your two cents worth for the protection of wildlife goes a long way at least if you do it the right way and to enable all wildlife enthusiasts to help out conservationists, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has teamed up with FishBrain to launch a new feature of the app that will help the American public identify and document threatened, endangered and candidate species.
FishBrain is the world’s largest free-to-use app and social network for anglers and the app enables its users to log sightings of up to 50 at-risk species during their regular fishing trips.
The data collected through the app will assist conservationists and academics in determining where the animals are found, the habitat they are in and the habitat they need, the reasons for their decline, and how the public can help protect and conserve native wildlife for future generations.
One of the first things at hand for FishBrain and US FWS was to determine the species that would be included in the app. For this, FWS examined all of the occurrences of threatened and endangered species near major streams, rivers, lakes, creeks and other bodies of water.
Since water is critically important to numerous species, this yielded millions of results. To further refine this search, the team used a coarse filter approach to focus on larger bodies of water and limited results to species likely to be encountered by anglers, and those known to come into contact with the fishing community.
“Of all the different hobbyists, anglers are among the best when it comes to being aware of the need for conservation,” Johan Attby, CEO of FishBrain said. “The natural world is such an important aspect of everyone’s lives, but it is anglers who are able to experience and appreciate it on a day to day basis.”
The final list of species provided to FishBrain, includes animals across the United States that are protected as threatened and endangered under the Endangered Species Act, as well as candidates for federal protection and those protected as threatened or endangered by individual states.
Examples include fish such as the shortnose sturgeon, birds such as the whooping crane, reptiles, such as Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, amphibians such as the California red-legged frog, and mammals such as the Columbia white-tailed deer. The full list of species with accompanying information and photographs is available at www.fishbrain.com.
