South African Wetland Survey

Wetlands of South Africa

The purpose of this project is to confirm the locality and type of wetlands across South Africa.
To qualify for use in iNaturalist, a dominant plant species must be the focus of an observation. You may record the same wetland many times for different plant species, but you may only have one plant species per observation.

The focus of this project is to record the dominant Hydrogeomorphic Unit of the Inland Aquatic Ecosystems based on the SA Classification System for Wetlands. Details of the units can be found in the journal section of this project if you are unfamiliar with them. Alternatively the classification is available at http://biodiversityadvisor.sanbi.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Classification-system-for-wetlands-other-aquatic-ecosystems.pdf
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Please only use this project for wetlands and rigorously follow the definition of the types from the SA Classification System for Wetlands.
Your data will help to ground-truth South Africa's wetlands and support updates of the National Wetland Map. Locality resolutions finer than 30m accuracy are preferred.

These wetland species localities will also directly contribute the freshwater plants of South Africa project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/freshwater-biodiversity-of-south-africa-wetland-plants, which is project to develop a definitive master list of wetland plants in South Africa. The site uses an existing master list to passively scoop and visualise all iNaturalist recorded occurrences of the species listed. Volunteers can assist by commenting on the list if they notice species missing from the list that they commonly notice in wetlands. We hope to invite much discussion in the comments section, especially in the early phase of the project as the master list currently only includes species considered to be “obligate” i.e. always found in wetlands.

This is also an opportunity to increase our understanding of the range of wetland plant species preferences to soil and water conditions in different parts of the country. If you are able please record additional information on water conditions at the time of your observation it would help with understanding of these species.
These fields are available with this project but not mandatory : please try and assist though:
Inundation (Hydorological Regime Level 5)
As your observation is for a particular date, the flow types, period of inundation and saturation and depth classes are s spot record. We would like the water depth (+ for above surface, - for below) and substrate type , and substrate type. Details are in the journal. less ↑