When educator Joe Montes de Oca is not teaching Portuguese and Italian in a Miami high school, he spends the majority of his free time exploring Miami-Dade County and documenting the biodiversity he finds and adding identifications on iNaturalist, a social network of naturalists, citizen scientists and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe.

Montes de Oca also has a part-time job completing plant monitoring in the “Hole-in-the-Donut” in Everglades National Park, a restoration area that has successfully been transformed from an old agricultural area that was taken over by Brazilian pepper into a wetland dominated by native species.