Now that the year has come to an end, we thought it would be fun to rerun our script that calculates the "inat firsts" - the set of taxa for which we are the only observer - and compare it to what we did in 2020. We took it a step further and created a spreadsheet with locality notes and augmented it with GBIF counts to see how things line up and where iNaturalist biases exist. Needless to say, there are some interesting - but not particularly surprising - discrepancies, particularly with obscure and difficult-to-identify groups of insects, for whom we were lucky enough to often get expert help. If anyone wants to play around with the script to see your own stats, let me know and I'd be happy to provide further instructions.

Here is the report.

Notes:

• Blue rows are plants
• Green rows are taxa for which GBIF has only 1 or 0 observations. Meant to indicate objective rarity.
• Orange rows are taxa with interesting notes
• This includes all of the "inat first" taxa, not just 2022.

Summary stats:

• 188 taxa, up from 33 in 2020.
• Most common groups are Stoneflies, Elateridae, Ground beetles
• Most common localities are San Diego County, Dunsmuir, Pemberton Valley (where Trevor is from)

Caveats:

• GBIF counts are a proxy for overall rarity, but not a perfect one: Many museums and other collections don't upload their data to GBIF and I didn't have the time to track down all available databases. Still, it serves as a fun comparison.
• Genera and family level data were excluded (the script doesn't handle this case). Correspondingly, this means undescribed species are excluded.

Huge thanks to all the identifiers helping to enrich the iNat dataset and help all of us learn!! Here's to a great 2023 year with many new taxa added :). Get out there and look for underrepresented taxa - still so much to be found and many photos to be added!