🌿 Ecology

iNaturalist has fundamentally changed what is possible in ecological research. A dataset that would have required years of fieldwork can now be assembled in seconds via API call. The temporal analysis in DIPODOMYS shows the explosion clearly — a flat line of museum specimen records from the early 20th century, modest upticks from mid-century field surveys, then a near-vertical spike after 2012 as iNaturalist reached critical mass.

But the bias is real and worth naming: we know more about where these animals were seen in 2023 than in 1983 not because their range changed, but because observer coverage changed. Understanding what the data doesn't show is as important as understanding what it does.

Where the two species meet — as they do across Death Valley's sandy flats — they partition microhabitats. Deserti takes the open dunes. Merriami works the surrounding scrub. The boundary is ecological, not geographic — drawn in seed patches and burrow densities and nightly foraging circuits.

The elevation chart in DIPODOMYS shows this directly: deserti clusters near and below sea level on the valley floor. Merriami spreads across a wider elevation range, turning up on bajadas, in canyons, on the surrounding ranges. Two species, same valley, different vertical worlds.