400 observations and counting!
Greetings, pollinator hunters! We're thrilled to see our observation totals hit the 400 mark this week, with 100 of those observations coming in the last week alone. We're getting some great records of the target species--bees, flower longhorns, hairy flower scarabs, hover flies, sphinx moths, and flower moths--all over New York. We're well on our way to making real contributions to understanding the distributions of these important pollinators.
What better way to spend a hot summer day than staring at flowers and seeing who visits for a drink? Keep those observations coming!
Comentarios
It's difficult to keep the narrow taxa in mind when adding observations. This discourages contributions.
Is there some way to configure the project to automatically add observations that match your contraints?
I slightly agree. I wish there was an easier way to add the focal taxa to the project. It's hard for me to know which species I should add to the project when I'm out in the field and don't know the exact genus and species.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll admit that the decision on how tightly to restrict submissions has been a bit of a dilemma--while we don't want to get overwhelmed with submissions of non-focal taxa, like butterflies or robber flies, we want to encourage participants to submit anything they think might be one of the focal taxa. So I've set the project's "rules" to allow all sphinx moths, Schinia moths, hover flies, bees, long-horned beetles, hairy flower scarabs, and bee flies. Only subsets of bees and long-horned beetles are focal taxa, but it seemed best to allow submissions of any of them. In the "Terms and Rules" of the project, which you can access on the upper right, it looks like this:
"must be in taxon Sphingidae or must be in taxon Schinia or must be in taxon Syrphidae or must be in taxon Anthophila or must be in taxon Cerambycidae or must be in taxon Trichiotinus or must be in taxon Bombylius"
Perhaps it would help to have these taxonomic constraints more front and center? I'm reluctant to open it up to submissions of all pollinators because we would like project participants to spend their energy on the focal groups. But I'm open to other suggestions.
This past April or May, the iNaturalist developers introduced "collection" projects, which do exactly what xris suggested--they will include all observations matching our constraints (the taxonomic ones plus having a photo plus being in NY). I thought it would be confusing to change our brand new project at that time, but I expect to make the switch this fall. That will eliminate the need to add observations to this project specifically, although I like seeing the numbers for deliberate contributions to the ESNPS.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I think the automatic addition of observations that meet your criteria is the way to go.
I'm aware, technically, of the taxa restrictions. But I'm not an entomologist. I have no idea what "Schinia" is, for example, without looking it up in a taxonomy tree. I know Syrphidae, but I don't always know which flies are in that family. (In a recent online quiz, I classified 19/20 insects correctly, but I didn't know that Narcissus bulb fly is in Syrphidae.)
When I've tried adding observations I thought fit your restrictions, they were rejected. I gave up trying after that.
After some thought, I've considerably broadened the taxa allowed by the project. I've put our focal taxa right in the Description to encourage observations of those groups, but we're now allowing any bee, fly, moth, or beetle to be added to the project. Thanks again for the input, and please consider trying again!
In which case, I have LOTS of observations to add!
Thank you.
Huh. It appears that most of my suitable observations were already included! I did find a few that were missing, and one that was missing location, and so not a candidate.
It's peak pollinator observation season. I can't get you to 800, but I'll do my part.
Thank you! In addition, I just broadened Anthophila (bees) to include all Hymenoptera. That way if someone has an insect they're not sure is a bee or wasp, they can still upload it.
Looking forward to your observations.
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