Archivos de Diario para febrero 2022

miércoles, 02 de febrero de 2022

Happy Ground Hog Day!

Feb 2, and we're expecting some winter weather over much of the state. No Dragons or Damsels, but the nymphs/naiads are in their watery niches waiting for warmer days.

One of the things I think about is comparing Odonata recent years to the past. Given the volume of new observations since 2017, this is a bit of a challenge. We can now get more data points in 1 year than we had in the first 100 years of the Ohio Odonata Society. Certainly some things have changed. A number of species recorded in the past have not been seen in the last 5 years, but we also have a number of species that are new to the state. Some of the not-documented species were always rare, so comparing 127 years to the last 5 isn't the best fit. I'll be working on this.

For now, let's consider some things that appear to be consistent. Numbers pick up considerably in May, then peak in June and July. This makes some sense. Both recent years and historical records show species diversity peaking in early to mid June. July continues with good numbers on total observations, but slightly lower species numbers.

Here are species counts by month.

Month pre-2001 2001-16 2017-20 2021
Mar 7 6 5 1
Apr 18 22 28 13
May 107 93 99 79
Jun 144 129 133 118
Jul 138 122 121 97
Aug 113 98 94 79
Sep 91 76 78 69
Oct 48 37 61 40
Nov 13 8 13 8

Here are record (observation) counts by month.

Month pre-2001 2001-16 2017-20 2021
Mar 9 11 14 14
Apr 81 106 487 219
May 1877 1118 6207 2264
Jun 7089 3600 21901 8300
Jul 7518 2789 23499 6649
Aug 5063 1736 18236 4516
Sep 2359 1028 8199 2964
Oct 619 255 1832 1046
Nov 49 73 181 260

The takeaway here is get out to your wetlands in early June - you're likely to see more species than any other time of year.

I'll be putting some charts on the Ohio Odonata FaceBook page if you're interested.

Another point of continuity is more observers in more counties leads to more observations and species. We have matched or surpassed the number of counties with observations by month in recent years, and have swamped the number of individuals contributing to the data. In both June and July of 2021 we had over 500 different people reporting observations, the first time we've had 500+ in a month.

Publicado el miércoles, 02 de febrero de 2022 a las 09:49 PM por jimlem jimlem | 6 comentarios | Deja un comentario

domingo, 06 de febrero de 2022

February 6 - Fun with Numbers

While the Ohio Odonata data are a long way from big data, there are still enough to provide some interesting looks.

If we zoom in to look at individual days, recent years dominate the numbers.

Here are the data for the top days, sorted by the number of records. This sort also captures the top days on species count, county count, and observer count.

Mon Day Year #Records #Species #Counties #People
Jun 23 2019 584 66 40 57
Jun 21 2019 582 58 42 59
Jul 14 2019 569 53 41 67
Jun 8 2019 541 66 33 61
Jul 13 2019 537 52 38 79
Jun 1 2019 531 59 30 65
Jul 8 2019 505 58 44 63
Jul 23 2019 489 50 38 65
Jun 12 2021 458 66 40 84
Jun 17 2021 446 57 40 67
Jun 26 2021 442 60 37 71

Three days all have 66 species recorded. 66 is 42% of our iNat species list - in a day.
One day (Jul 8, 2019) had records in 44 counties. This is half our counties.
The same recent day (Jun 12, 2021) that had 66 species also had the top number of individual observers with 84. This 16% of our Jun 2021 total.

The biggest single day in our data for a species, was Jul 13, 2019 for Blue Dasher with 74 observations in 25 counties.

You may recall that 2019 was the year of our last Dragonfly Conference (pre-CoVid), and our biggest data year - still trying to catch up with that.

So, what did we see on Jun 12, 2021?

species #
Gray Petaltail 2
Dragonhunter 4
Rusty Snaketail 1
Riffle Snaketail 1
Midland Clubtail 1
Cobra Clubtail 1
Pronghorn Clubtail 1
Unicorn Clubtail 10
Black-shouldered Spinyleg 1
Eastern Least Clubtail 1
Comet Darner 1
Common Green Darner 2
Cyrano Darner 2
Swamp Darner 5
Spatterdock Darner 2
Brown Spiketail 1
Prince Baskettail 7
Common Baskettail 1
Elfin Skimmer 2
Eastern Amberwing 13
Calico Pennant 3
Banded Pennant 1
Widow Skimmer 14
Golden-winged Skimmer 1
Spangled Skimmer 2
Painted Skimmer 1
Twelve-spotted Skimmer 22
Slaty Skimmer 7
Common Whitetail 50
Blue-faced Meadowhawk 3
Dot-tailed Whiteface 6
Belted Whiteface 1
Blue Dasher 37
Eastern Pondhawk 28
Black Saddlebags 4
Carolina Saddlebags 6
Ebony Jewelwing 47
Elegant Spreadwing 4
Amber-winged Spreadwing 3
Lyre-tipped Spreadwing 6
Sweetflag Spreadwing 4
Southern Spreadwing 1
Slender Spreadwing 8
Emerald Spreadwing 4
Swamp Spreadwing 1
Blue-fronted Dancer 6
Seepage Dancer 2
Violet Dancer 11
Powdered Dancer 14
Blue-ringed Dancer 1
Blue-tipped Dancer 17
Eastern Red Damsel 4
Sedge Sprite 1
Aurora Damsel 2
Turquoise Bluet 1
Skimming Bluet 7
Orange Bluet 5
Vesper Bluet 6
Stream Bluet 3
Familiar Bluet 1
Double-striped Bluet 7
Azure Bluet 6
Westfall's Slender Bluet 6
Fragile Forktail 16
Eastern Forktail 17
Citrine Forktail 2

Who did the seeing?

username #
agreenantioch 2
arand 12
benmeredyk 8
billiken 3
birdstar 1
carolr 12
carrie109 1
cincyjeff 3
czach 5
davee3 1
ddwhitis 1
dhochadel 4
diane152 1
dmarsh2 9
dougoveracker 4
dtibbetts 3
ellienowels 1
entomo-logic 2
eunicepm 1
fruitoftheanus 1
goatgardener 1
gollwoods 1
henryr10 7
jcefus 13
jessekay7 1
jheiser 20
jimdanzi 3
jnwelty 1
johnlandon 1
josephclark 2
jparr83 1
jrmcfarland 1
jwhite_geauga 1
jwosborn 7
kemper 2
kimsmith 7
laureldoc 20
leshwatt 1
lgilbert 1
liliumoryza 1
lisaclairemiller 41
malisaspring 4
markc61 1
matthewschmalz 4
mcanlic 3
mebrosius 1
mikeabel 2
mikehensley75 1
mindysykes 1
mlski 1
mmnat 1
monkeycot 1
morgan333 1
mulyza 1
murrdogg 5
nnavarre 1
pbkelly 4
pepperguy 1
phatpharmjam 1
phoenixb 1
plemmink 1
quddy 7
rasamoto 39
rbloom1986 1
rboudouris 1
rcurtis 2
ricknirschl 26
roamingthewoods 40
russell_engelman 16
sallypsandpiper 38
shaunpogacnik95 1
smccabr 1
smwhite 3
srmyers 1
susanbrauning 4
susnyder 1
tdinovo 1
terrinorris 6
theotherjfk 3
vshoward 2
whateverwatcher 13
wildlifecmh 2
winkbaldwin 2
zgraham1994 4

This looks like most of the usual crowd. This was a sunny Saturday. A funny bit on this, at least for me, is that I missed that day. So it goes.

Publicado el domingo, 06 de febrero de 2022 a las 09:13 PM por jimlem jimlem | 2 comentarios | Deja un comentario

jueves, 10 de febrero de 2022

Feb 10, More on Data - All Years

Looking at OOS data for observations by day across all years.

Jun 23 has been especially busy with 1921 total records.

Peak days occur across several months. The period Jun 11 to Jul 20 has over 1000 per day. This 40 day period is our peak.

Here the plot of species observed by day. This is the total of each day for all years.

Peak number of species observed on a day has been 111 on Jun 14 and Jun 23. The other three days of the top five occur in between the top two. Both Jun 14 and Jun 23 had observations from 73 counties. Interesting to me is Jun 15 has 110 species with over 500 fewer total observations than Jun 14 and Jun 23.

While the scales don't match, comparing observations to species recorded you see one following the other early in the season, then relative species numbers holding up longer than observations.

Publicado el jueves, 10 de febrero de 2022 a las 04:10 PM por jimlem jimlem | 3 comentarios | Deja un comentario

lunes, 14 de febrero de 2022

Happy Valentine's' Day

So, back to the question of our survey effort in 2021... There were several steps of forward and back. As one way to start. I selected several peak years.

You can see that cherry-picking years isn't apples to apples (sorry). The years most like 2021 were the recent survey years, so after some other starts and stops I ended up with an average of Species and Observations for the years 2016-2020. Next graphed those averages against 2021. Here are the charts on # Observations and # Species recorded for the standard date intervals. For Observations, this is stack of 2021 to the average. Species is shown as a line.

Looks like we're in the zone. Putting these together...

Observations and the number of species track together, peaking in June. Moving forward the recent years average will provide a baseline to compare current individual years.

Compared to the average, across the periods, 2021 had a little better numbers, about an 3% increase in the number of species and about a 28% increase in observations. Good effort.

Publicado el lunes, 14 de febrero de 2022 a las 06:43 PM por jimlem jimlem | 3 comentarios | Deja un comentario

sábado, 19 de febrero de 2022

Feb 18, Species Flow

Through the observation data we can track the dates of a species arrival or first observation and departure or last observation. These are plotted in the flight charts. The earliest recorded arrival being Variegated Meadowhawk on March 12, the latest species to arrive being Smoky Rubyspot on August 7. The earliest departures are Beaverpond & Slender Baskettails on June 11, the latest recorded departure is Eastern Forktail on November 30. In charting the summarized data by month for species observed in the last 5 years, we see a flow of arrivals and departures.

Arrivals peak in May. July begins a procession of departures. In between, we have our peak in diversity. Most departures occur prior to November. Once we observe a species, their monthly record is continuous (no gaps). Dragonflies outnumber damselflies, so they chart larger numbers. Interesting that more Damsel species persist at season end.

Publicado el sábado, 19 de febrero de 2022 a las 02:03 AM por jimlem jimlem | 1 comentario | Deja un comentario

martes, 22 de febrero de 2022

2/22/22 - that's a lot of two's!

Answering a couple questions.

I had a question about the rate of discovery of Ohio Odonata. This is a chart of the number of state records per year (blue bars/left scale) and the cumulative species total (green line/right scale). 1896 must of been an exciting time to find Dragons and Damsels, largely the work of RC Osburn and JS Hine. The majority of Ohio species were in place by 1900. The bump in the 1930's and 40's was DJ Borror and HF Price.

A second question was about a current chart on observations and species recorded. This chart shows the 5 year average data over the course of the flight season.

Publicado el martes, 22 de febrero de 2022 a las 10:35 PM por jimlem jimlem | 1 comentario | Deja un comentario

jueves, 24 de febrero de 2022

Feb 24 - Another Question

I started a chart on the growth of County Records over the years. Recall that a County Record is the first recorded occurrence of a species in a county. This is a singular event. You can't repeat a County Record, they get more difficult as time goes by. The growth in Co Recs would be the basis of this chart - the number of new county records (orange bars, scale on the left) and the cumulative number of County Records (yellow line, scale on the right).

Also added is the unique number of county/species pairs for a year (green line - fortunately this also works with the right scale). The glory years for County records were 1959 and 1960 with 404 and 387 respectively. A second spike was 306 and 308 Co Recs in 2018-19. This seemed nice but maybe not the whole story. We add county/species combinations, but just as interesting is what we don't see.

Taking 1959 as an example, of the 404 Co Recs, 30 have not been repeated, while only 47 were not recorded in the most recent 5 years. That would put an extra 300+ in the recent years. The next plot follows the growth of county/species pairs (blue, left scale) and the number of missing county/species pairs - ones that had been previously recorded, and presumably could be found again (green, left scale).

The story then is the plot of the % void (possible-recorded). This ratio (yellow line, scale on the right) shows that in 2019 we recorded nearly 60% of the known county/species pairs. The average of the last 5 years is over 50%. Maintaining 50+ is more comprehensive than at any time in the last 100 years.

Publicado el jueves, 24 de febrero de 2022 a las 08:11 PM por jimlem jimlem | 1 comentario | Deja un comentario