The people who write here.
George Roark
I founded PollinatorWeb, and I’ve spent the last six years photographing what lives in the Sonoran Desert — most of it within a few miles of my house in Phoenix.
That has come to 20,615 observations covering 1,165 species. Of those, 10,430 have been reviewed and confirmed by other naturalists, reached research grade, and are published to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, where scientists can find and cite them. It isn’t a credential anybody hands you. It’s what accumulates when you keep going back to the same wash with a camera.
I contribute observations to Metro Phoenix EcoFlora with the Desert Botanical Garden, the Southwest Monarch Study, Maricopa County Parks butterfly monitoring and Eco-Blitz, and the City Nature Challenge each spring.
Everything on this site comes out of that. When I write that creosote hosts insects living nowhere else, or that desert mistletoe rather than the palo verde is what Great Purple Hairstreak caterpillars eat, it’s because I’ve photographed both ends of it. Where I’m not sure, I say so.
I also engrave the plant markers by hand, here in Phoenix.
My observations on iNaturalist · My records in GBIF
Elliott Gordon
Elliott lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and wrote the native bee content on this site. On iNaturalist he’s @egordon88, where he has logged 20,891 observations across 5,191 species and made more than 260,000 identifications for other people — enough that other observers now bring him the records they can’t settle themselves.