Moved to San Jose, California in January 2025 and currently working part time with the San Francisco Bay Wildlife Society out of the Environmental Education Center in Alviso as an interpretive associate for the Watershed Watch program. I am looking for more work, please get in touch if you are looking for someone with years of experience doing field work and documenting nature!

You can show support for the San Francisco Bay Wildlife Society, a non-profit friends group to USFW, by following us on Instagram & Facebook: @sfbayws
Our website has lots of great info about how you can get involved and make a difference in the Bay Area: https://sfbayws.org/
Here's the site for Watershed Watch (Santa Clara County), which centers around preventing urban runoff and protecting our water:
https://mywatershedwatch.org/

I see iNaturalist as a phenomenal resource for learning about nature. Having a community of experts, enthusiasts and newbies all interested in documenting biodiversity and learning about nature is something I really cherish! I have spent countless hours looking through this amazing database (via the website, inaturalist.org) along with other indispensable resources like bugguide.net and the Florida Plant Atlas to get comfortable IDing a fair percentage of the organisms in Miami-Dade County (at least the ones that are visible to the naked eye!) The iNat community has played an enormous part in encouraging me to pay more attention to organisms I would've otherwise ignored and I am immensely grateful for all the help I have received.

I highly encourage anyone new to iNaturalist to click around the database we all contribute to. This is best done through the website and not the iNaturalist app. Tinkering with the searches and filters is a great way to see how everything works and how useful your observations are to the general public and even biologists and taxonomists. Here are the observations from South Florida, for example: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=2345

If you are interested in learning more about how to use iNaturalist, I am available to answer questions and also provide tips and advice. Just get in touch with me at joemdo.inaturalist@gmail.com with your availability and we can coordinate an online meeting via Zoom. I am happy to meet with organizations, groups or one-on-one.

You can also check out an overview of how to use iNaturalist at the link below. It includes plenty of examples of organisms you can find in South Florida:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bqiz6b1QgJr6wVIA2F906U-5txKsvdSu/view?usp=sharing

About me:
I was born and raised in Miami, FL and started getting into nature when I was around 24 years old. Started with freshwater fishing (mostly for largemouth bass and peacock bass) but then started noticing birds. Little by little, I realized what I had been missing out on and everything just continued to snowball as my interest in nature just kept on growing and covering more and more groups of organisms (bugs, then plants and marine organisms and shells and on and on). In the past few years I have committed a lot more time to adding identifications here on iNaturalist in Miami-Dade and the surrounding counties. I am always really grateful when I get help from the iNat community and the dopamine hit from finding out what you saw is much greater than anything social media can provide, so I try to help whenever I can! I am now located in San Jose, California and excited to learn all about the new habitats around me.

I consider myself a generalist when it comes to nature. In other words, I know a little bit about many different groups of organisms found in South Florida but I'm not an expert in any specific group. Although I don't have a formal education in biology, I have explored many different habitats in South Florida, usually with the goal of finding organisms that are new to me, but also painting a good picture of the common organisms in the area.

I taught Portuguese and Italian at a high school in Miami for 8 years and also had a part time job from 2019-2025 completing plant monitoring in the "Hole-in-the-Donut" in Everglades National Park with one of the best botanists in South Florida (thanks Steve!) The "HID" is an enormous restoration area that has successfully been transformed from an old agricultural area that was taken over by Brazilian pepper into a wetland dominated by native species. Happy to send a video describing a typical day in the field if you'd like to see it. More info about the HID here: https://www.nps.gov/ever/learn/nature/hidprogram.htm

Thanks for reading and happy iNatting!