Before and After: Why you don't need to touch grass to dramatically improve images of flora and fauna
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Inspired by Adam Cuerden's recent article on finding and improving photos for biographies, I wanted to write a quick guide to finding and improving images for biology using a tool called Wiki Loves iNaturalist. It has a lot of nice functionality that I encourage you to play with, but before we get to a mini-tutorial, let's do a round of before and after photos so you can see what it offers.
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Yay, makeovers! Or at least a change from pinned insects to live specimens. All the updated photos came from iNaturalist, a platform that allows scientists to track ecosystems in real-time through crowdsourcing. Because iNaturalist allows users to release their observations under Creative Commons licenses (if they choose), it can be a great resource for finding biology photos for Wikipedia.
As an example for this tutorial, let's find a good photo on iNat to illustrate Bombus pauloensis, the Paulista bumblebee, which has lots of enwiki article text but not one image! Fair warning: I'm a mobile-only user, so this mini-tutorial is screenshots via iPhone. I trust that after you become a WikiLovesiNat addict you will create a much prettier tutorial.