Diario del proyecto Illinois Botanists Big Year 2018

It's late September and the woodland asters are in full glorious bloom. The heat is finally starting to subside, but the mosquitoes are not. Anyone else getting just totally eaten alive??? I've gone through almost a whole bottle of bugspray just in the past week. o_o

Current Illinois Botanists Big Year Stats:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/illinois-botanists-big-year-2018 (help identify)

28,479 observations
1,357 species
1,691 observers
792 identifiers

We've added 39 new species since last month and we're about 40 species shy of last year's total. There's still time of course! All these stats are only counting Research Grade observations, so there are likely plenty of species hiding waiting for ID or ID confirmation. Can you lend a hand? Help identify at this link!

Recently-observed Favorites

Fruits of puzzleplant aka Illinois bundleflower (Desmanthus illinoensis) by @ever1earn.


Fringey cap of burr oak (Quercus macrocarpa) by @kennedy9094. Have you ever felt the inside of a burr acorn cap? So soft.


Lovely ol' stiff gentian (Gentianella quinquefolia) by @skrentnyjeff.


Glowing fruits of cranberry viburnum (Viburnum opulus) by @sanguinaria33. If you squint hard enough you can see that you can forget there are two subspecies you're supposed to care about.


Harbinger-of-fall, the I'm-not-in-New-England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae) by @kae91

Below are links to what we as a group have found in 2018 so far compared to what has been documented on iNaturalist before 2018. The lists in the links below will update automatically as people continue adding observations throughout the year. iNaturalist's compare tool limits us to check 500 taxa at a time, so these are broken into several chunks.

▶Non-flowering plants
▶Monocots excluding Poales
▶Poales (grasses, sedges, rushes, & friends)
▶Plants in Asterales (sunflower family and friends)
▶Plants in Fabales (pea family and friends)
▶Plants in Lamiales (mint family and friends)
▶Plants in Rosales (rose family and friends)
▶Plants in Brassicales (mustard family and friends)
▶Plants in Ranunculales (buttercup family and friends)
▶Plants in Caryophyllales (pink family and friends)
▶All other (eu)dicots except the groups above

See what species you haven't observed yet in Illinois with the following link. Just change it from my username (bouteloua) to yours:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?hrank=species&place_id=35&taxon_id=47125&unobserved_by_user_id=bouteloua&view=species

-cassi