Add Your Observations

Add Your Observations

Get going
    1. Collect data in the field
      Choose a species to look for and a place to look for it.
      Print a Vital Signs datasheet to take with you.
      Grab the tools you need for your sampling method.
      Teachers, please start here

    2. Put your data on the website

      Register or login
      Go to My Vital Signs
      Click Add new investigation to start entering your data!

    Field work resources | Species identification guides | Get started!

New to Vital Signs?

So you're eager to contribute your own species observations to Vital Signs? Great. Here's how to get right out there looking for species. If you are a teacher working with teams of students, your route is slightly different, just as fun, and starts at VS in classrooms.

Ready to enter your data?

You've just had a wild sampling adventure knee-deep in the marsh, swatting mosquitoes in the forest, tipping over in your kayak, slipping on Ascophyllum and are ready to move your observations from trampled, soil-stained datasheet to the web. Get to it. Register or log in to put your data on the web! We want to see what you found (or didn't find), and learn from your experience.

Something holding you back?

If you wait until you know everything you could possibly know about Vital Signs or invasive species or habitats or field work, there’s a very good chance that you will never ever collect any data. So just get started, expect to mess up, expect to want to do things differently next time, and learn and improve as you go!

Thank you

Thank you for being brave, for looking closely, for adding observations, for sharing your time and energy with the Vital Signs community. We hope to see your species and habitat data on the map and in the database soon.

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Who is Vital Signs?

Citizen Scientists Citizen Scientists
Scientists Scientists
Students Students
Teachers Teachers

Recent Observations

Celastrus orbiculatus
Oriental bittersweet
Was FOUND by Julia DLWA
on 2009-12-23 in Somerville
Typha latifolia
Broad-leaved cattail
Was FOUND by Pacificcrabs
on 2009-10-05 in Westbrook
Typha angustifolia
Narrow-leaved cattail
Was FOUND by Loosestrifes
on 2009-10-05 in Westbrook

Notes from the Field

Phragmites australis
BACA submitted this on 2009-10-19
This was a really amazing experience, because we all were able to observe plants and their natural habitats that we've been by for years, but never noticed, or knew the importance of.
Vital Signs is a Gulf of Maine Research Institute Program. Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 3.0 License.