Collecting Novel Data From iNaturalist Photos to Teach Students About the Impacts of Urbanization on Animal Behavior & Ecological Interactions

While urbanization can impact animal behavior and ecological interactions, designing activities for students to explore these impacts can be challenging. Here, we present an activity that can help students collect data and ask authentic research questions about how animal behavior and ecological interactions are altered by urbanization using data from Research Grade photographs of lizards from the iNaturalist database and geospatial data on impervious surface cover from the National Land Cover Database. This activity helps students learn how to access and collect novel data from iNaturalist photographs, use these data to generate hypotheses, and build skills managing, visualizing, and analyzing large-scale environmental and spatial datasets. While we focused on understanding the impacts of urbanization on lizard species for this activity, we believe that this approach and each of the steps within it are adaptable to different taxonomic groups and could be modified to work in both lower- and upper-level courses in a variety of different disciplines including animal behavior, conservation biology, ecology, environmental science, evolution, geographic information systems, and organismal biology.