DragonflyIndia is 12 years

Dear Odonutters and Naturalists,

I am so happy to wish DragonflyIndia a very happy birthday. DragonflyIndia enters teens now.

It was in 2005 during ButterflyIndia meet at Aralam, David Raju, Kiran C G, Subbu and me discussed the idea of bringing Odonata enthusiasts and researchers of Indian Subcontinent together on a virtual platform YahooGroups. It has been growing by leaps and bounds after that.

We have presence on most of the social media platforms that people use to talk about Biodiversity. We are in process of developing a comprehensive resource Odonata of India,  a very vibrant facebook group, some serious data curation efforts on India Biodiversity Portal and iNaturalist and to top it all our Meets. 

To keep up with updates we have DiversityIndia updates page and twitter @dragonflyindia and #dragonflyIndia

Of course this would not have been possible without enthusiasm and support of the the members, group admins and coordinators of the meets.

Now that we are entering teens, it is time to get more serious and systematic in our contributions, and also have more fun together. Any ideas for activities that our group should take up, please share here in comments.

Happy Birthday DragonflyIndia once again.

Amphibians of India website launched

http://www.indianamphibians.org/

The ballooning male of the bush frog, Raorchestes jayarami, announced a very happy news today: there is now an Amphibians of India website that promises to be another resounding success in citizen science. Following the successful Facebook group, Reptiles and Amphibians of India, and inspired by the powerful online platform of the Butterflies of India website, we hope that this website will provide a critical resource on amphibian diversity that has been sorely missing in India. 

The Amphibians of India website has three main objectives: 

1. consolidate available information on diversity and distribution,
2. actively collect new information on all aspects of Indian amphibians through research
3. communicate this information with policy makers and work with various governing bodies so that the information is used to conserve amphibians and their habitats in India. 

Most of this work will be done as a collaborative scientific enterprise involving both professional and citizen scientists.
We also hope that our highly integrated community of amateur naturalists, professional scientists, educators and conservationists will both build this online platform and use the information generated here for effective conservation of Indian amphibians. Please email if you have any comments or wish to contribute to this website in various ways.

- Varad Giri, Sandeep Das, Akshay Khandekar, Purnendu Roy, and Krushnamegh Kunte
editors, Amphibians of India. 
11 September 2017.

The Moths of India website has 700 species

Hello everybody,

The Moths of India website has now reached 700 species, an incredible journey in less than two years. The website has also recorded more than 6,500 unique visitors, a number that is growing weekly, and bodes well for growing the “moth-ers” community in India and elsewhere. Even more encouraging is the number of contributors has increased, and many different people have started uploading moth species on the website.

Interesting records include

Comostola hauensteini, a new species described only in 2004. MOI website reports the first records from Paschimbanga and Arunachal Pradesh for this species.
http://www.mothsofindia.org/sp/356112/Comostola-hauensteini

The lovely day-flying moths Dysphania percota and Dysphania nelera. The website now has 4 species of Dysphania. 

http://www.mothsofindia.org/sp/356085/Dysphania-percota

http://www.mothsofindia.org/sp/356086/Dysphania-nelera

among many others.

Thanks to all the contributors and reviewers for making this happen.

And we are happy to report another sister website based on the architecture of these websites, http://www.indianreptiles.org/home.

The Moths of India team
http://www.mothsofindia.org/website-teams