Laying aside the fact that New Year's resolutions litter the highways of hope like burned-out Iraqi vehicles on the road from Kuwait to Baghdad back in 1991, here are my goals relevant to iNat:

1. I want to go back over my old observations, refreshing the memory as to positive IDs and taking another crack on unconfirmed IDs.
2. My goal is to get much better at plant ID and maybe to develop a little expertise in taxa of interest. Insect ID I am content to mostly vacate the field of to others, and learning birds is taking care of itself.
3. I want to take sharper better photos and to include a measure of scale. I got an old Tamron/Quantaray 70-300 lens for $20+ with a macro switch that takes excellent close-up photos, though it is not as good a telephoto as the 75-300 one-touch Nikkors I have. No excuse not to get in close.
4. I want to relate observations to locations and the history of the locations. For example, are some plant species in zones around railroad tracks where seeds were scattered from cattle cars? For example, Rob Lee says areas in city parks that I call "wild" are formed from topsoil bulldozed up when parklands were leveled, or material dredged up from streambeds or lakebeds. Is this true and if so how was the debris colonized by plants and by which plants? (I guess I am as ever process-focused.)

Posted on December 21, 2018 07:22 PM by thebark