I was asked by Bruce McCune to create an iNaturalist project that collects observations of lichens from the multiple field trips during the NWL Annual Spring Meeting this March. For those already familiar with the platform iNaturalist, here is the link: Northwest Lichenologists 2025 field trips , you might find that you have already been added as I added those who's usernames I knew.

For those not familiar with iNaturalist, it is “an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature...a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool” You can use it to record your own observations, get help with identifications, collaborate with others to collect this kind of information for a common purpose, or access the observational data collected by iNaturalist users.
As you all probably know, lichens are an under-reported taxon, and that is also true on iNaturalist. I would highly encourage anyone with an interest in lichens to join the platform to further the collective knowledge of lichens. Join here.

Feel free to reach out to me(Deniz) with any questions you might have.

"The observations seem to be sprinkled much more widely than the sites -- not sure why this is..."

Some observations in the project have location geoprivacy and the exact locations are obscured either due to the observer choosing to do so or it is a rare species that automatically got obscured.

From the iNaturalist help pages: see attachment

Users can choose to trust each other with locations, or to trust projects with specific location, which will then be viewable within an observation page. But viewing observations from the map view will still show the obscured location as the API fetches the public information and not user specific information.

An easier way to get to a map view from the project page is to click on observations(located between overview and species) then select map(left of grid under overview)= https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/northwest-lichenologists-2025-field-trips?tab=observations&subtab=map