Top observer

Botanist Tony Rebelo is the biggest contributor to the biodiversity app iNaturalist in SA. Having identified 10,203 species in 139,649 observations, he ranks among their top five observers in the world. “I’ve always been interested in getting people involved, right from when I joined the Botanical Society in 1979,” says Rebelo, who launched the Protea Atlas in the early ’90s to map species distribution. “In those days we were paperbased and I would go to the post office to get reports.”

The author of The Field guide to Proteas of Southern Africa, he verifies more than 95% of protea sightings recorded on iNaturalist.