Running now · 9–16 August 2026

A few thousand people are standing on the Snæfellsnes coast holding cameras

The Snæfellsnes coast is one of the least documented ecologies in Iceland. For one week that stops being a problem, because the audience is the instrument.

observations

species

observers

Counts at project creation, 12 Aug 2026. Live figures pull from iNaturalist; the closing count is due 16 Aug.

Why this is the only instrument that can detect an introduction

Without a prior species list, nobody can ever say a species is new. Not next year, not in ten years, not after the thing that arrived in a container has spread past the fence. Biosecurity is the one harm on a site like this that is permanent and unbounded, and the entire case for taking it seriously rests on being able to notice it, which rests on a baseline that only exists if somebody makes one.

It is a collection project over the Snæfellsbær standard place, so it auto-collects and it back-fills: nobody has to remember to add anything, and observations logged before it existed are already counted. Research Grade records flow to GBIF automatically, where every future study of this place will use them.

Photograph the boring stuff

Everyone photographs the terns and the puffins. Almost nobody photographs moss, lichen, flies, seaweed or grasses, which is exactly where a record new to this square is likely to come from.

The wrack line at low tide is the richest few metres of the whole shoreline. Lava surfaces, close up are the endemic habitat and the least documented thing here. Insects on tent fabric in the morning are the easiest records anyone will get.

Blurry counts. Moss counts. You do not need to know what it is.

bioblitz/qr.svg → the iNaturalist project

What happens to it after Sunday

ExportPull the project's observations and reconcile them against data/species-snaefellsnes.json, and against the 411 species iNaturalist already holds for the Snæfellsbær place.

Count what is newAnything new to the 10 km square is a defensible "this event created data that did not exist", and the one figure in the whole framework that is unambiguously a gain.

Publish the counter-evidenceAny ledger this feeds has to carry its own literature's weaknesses next to it. Kettenring and Adams found most invasive-control studies never test whether natives actually return. A ledger that cites that is credible; one that does not is a brochure.

Claim nothing elseIt is a week of opportunistic phone records by untrained observers. It is a real baseline and a partial one, and saying so is what makes the number usable.