Putting a name on the familiar
We all at one point or another notice the wildlife that share our world. For many of us, it begins as children, perhaps turning over logs to discover centipedes, earwigs, pill bugs, and earthworms. Perhaps we plod through the muck of a nearby pond to watch minnows, tadpoles, and waterbugs, or turn our eyes upward to observe dragonflies and chimney swifts as they weave through the air. In the company of a knowledgeable adult, we learn to put names on these creatures, and in time they become familiar.

As we mature and become adults, those seeds of discovery that were planted as children grow as well, leading us to explore more exotic locales – desert, alpine, rainforest, tundra, or temperate forest – and sometimes with a field guide in hand we add to our personal catalogue of wildlife that began many years before.

Unfortunately, this progression from backyard explorer to adult wildlife enthusiast is less common in our present culture. Instead of freely exploring the backyard and local woods, children find themselves in highly structured "play", being shuttled from soccer practice, to ballet, to music practice, to a birthday party at an indoor play "park," and finally home, where they plant themselves in front of the television to play video games, or flip open their cell phones to text message their friends.

This theme of disconnecting from the natural world has been well-documented, even so far as to be labelled "nature-deficit disorder" by Richard Louv in his 2006 book Last Child in the Woods. Louv explores the possible causes of this growing deficiency in our youth, including, among others: fear of the "bogeyman," preoccupation with more technological entertainment, lack of parental involvement with the outdoors, an educational system that has lost any focus on natural history. As one fourth-grader is quoted in Louv's book, "I like to play indoors better, 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are."

Species Explorer is based on the belief that while technology can certainly pull society away from the natural world, it can just as easily be used to reconnect us. The tools provided by Species Explorer provide a context that encourages adults, families, and children to explore the outdoors, and share their discoveries with others. Just as the recent popularity of "geocaching" has coincided with a boom in portable GPS devices, the mobile version of Species Explorer takes advantage of the ubiquitous nature of cell phones to provide a platform for recording your observations. The online version of Species Explorer integrates features like dynamic "mashups," using maps, photos, and text notes to dynamically plot observation data from the entire Species Explorer community.