Influencers
There are way too many people who have helped me with identifications over the years for me to name them all here. I will always be grateful for their input. However, there are some people who have been instrumental in my nature-related work and I would like to publicly acknowledge that here.
Steve Brown (from Australia) was a customer at Rainbow Lodge, where I lived for 8 years. He was the first to inspire me to want to know what everything is. So, in some ways, it’s all his fault!
Les Day (a fellow Englishman, living on Koh Samui) saw a post I had added to a butterfly forum and reached out to offer me more general help. He has helped me enormously over the years with butterfly and, more recently, spittlebug (Cercopoidea) identifications.
Oleg Kosterin (from Russia) has helped massively with Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies). He has also included me as co-author of some of his papers on the Odonata of Cambodia. Recently, we have collaborated to produce a checklist of Cambodian butterflies. We intend doing further work on this with the aim of getting it published.
Jerome Constant has been a big help with Hemiptera (true bugs), in particularly Fulgoroidea (planthoppers). He has even named a species (Sogana chartieri Constant, 2019) after me! He also introduced me to stick insect, praying mantis, cicada and beetle experts.
Tek Lin SEOW has been an incredible (and very patient) help with identification of some very difficult butterflies and with tips to enable me to identify them myself.
Roger Kendrick was the catalyst to my usage of iNaturalist. He has also been very helpful with moth identifications. For several years, I said I would not get into moths because they are too hard. Now, thanks to Roger’s inspiration, very few nights go by when I do not photograph at least one moth (before I moved to Phnom Penh). They are still too hard, though!
Other notable nature contributors
Contributors to the website
The website is built on the TALL stack (for more details see my page on the technology of this site). So, I would like to thank the developers of the four contributing technologies.
In development I am using a whole bunch of free things to enable me to write, test and run the code. I am using Visual Studio Code as my IDE, with the very helpful laravel-ide-helper by Barry vd. Heuvel. I use Laragon to host my local environment. There are just too many node modules and composer packages to thank everyone!