The Flowering of Flickr

When I first stumbled across the photo sharing site Flickr, I thought it had great potential as a natural history resource. I'm pleased to report that, three years on, its potential is now being realised.

Since its early days Flickr has been used by budding wildlife photographers to showcase their work and seek feedback on technique. Over the years the contributing photographers have built up an impressive archive of images, many of which are licensed for use as illustrations.

However, the site's main potential lies in its communities, known on Flickr as groups, through which members can share photos and discuss topics of mutual interest. Some of the groups founded in the early days were concerned with natural history topics, but they tended to be very broad in scope. Examples include Birds, Butterflies and Flowers.

An early attempt to harness the power of Flickr led to the creation of a group called Field Guide: Birds of the World, an ambitious project which is still running today. So far nearly 5,000 people have taken part, contributing 47,000 photographs of more than 4,000 species of birds. The international make-up of this group has been a source of some friction, because the administrators ask contributors to tag pictures with the 'correct' name of each species. As names vary from country to country, it demonstrates the value of using the binomial nomenclature system.

The early natural history groups were often dominated by the USA and Canada, simply because Flickr had more members in North America. Since then the number of British Flickrites has steadily increased, and an assortment of UK-based natural history groups have emerged. Whilst some, like British Nature and British Wildlife, take a broad-brush approach, others are more tightly focused: British Mammals, British Wild Flowers, British Lepidoptera, British Insects & other Arthropods, British Fungi and Lichens, British Grasses, Sedges, Ferns and Rushes, etc, etc.

There seems to be a trend towards groups that focus on smaller geographical areas. Examples include Sussex Spiders and the Wild Flowers of Derbyshire (more about that group later).