Hi all,

absolutely fantabulous job on the BioBlitz this past week! We added nearly 1,000 new observations again on the last day of the challenge. I think we handily beat our challengers at UNC Greensboro with 4,017 observations of 738 species to their 476 observations of 207 species collected in our respective projects. Great student engagement at AppState showing once again that this is the place to be for biodiversity. :-)

Browse the observations in the project to see all the cool stuff that people have submitted so far. See something you really like? You can click the star to add it to your favorites! This also makes them pop up on the bottom of the stats page to share some of the highlights from our pool of observations.

This week will be dedicated to doing some curating of the data by adding and verifying species names (as well as catching up with academic advising). Some people who took pictures with non-phone cameras or collected samples for microscopy or other lab analyses are still working on uploading their observations. Remember the critical date for meeting the time frame of the challenge is when you took the picture/sample, not the day it was added to iNaturalist. As a result of all this, you may see observation numbers still go up and down a little. Stay tuned for more updates later this week, but I wanted to give a snapshot of where we stand right now.

Number of participants:

We had 184 observers submitting observations so far. This includes 168 (77%) out of the 219 people who joined the project, with some folks participating who weren't project members. I also wanted to give a shout-out to our 349 identifiers so far, and especially tsn who added well over 1,000 IDs for us! These are the experts helping us curate the raw data and getting our observations to Research Grade. The help is very much appreciated!

Number of observations:

• Total: 5,425 observations of 960 taxa uploaded
  This is on average ~775 observations per day, and in total ~30 observations per observer. We've been busy! About 26% of these are casual observations and that number will likely rise a bit as the iNaturalist community continues sifting through the data for IDs and annotations.

• Needs ID/Research Grade: 4,017 observations of 850 taxa uploaded
  These are the observations that count in the BioBlitz project. Many of these still need to be curated, so numbers may fluctuate a little bit. Remember only wild organisms are eligible for Research Grade, so if your observations were of e.g. planted stuff they may eventually drop out of the project.

• Most observations leaderboard: rivermont, leighalobelia, brookesbees, emma_nicholson, brynnaselah

Number of species:

This is really the interesting part and again some species identifications still need to be added so number may change slightly. Check out the project stats to see a break-down of the types of organisms observed and hover the cursor over the colored sections in the species wheel to see the numbers of taxa in each category. So far, 738 of the 850 taxa observed in our project (3,475 or 87% of 4,017 observations) have been narrowed down to species level. Out of these, almost half have been confirmed already to achieve Research Grade (1,655 or 41% of 4,017 observations).

• Most species leaderboard: leighablobelia, rivermont, brynnaselah, dendro-julia, hannah_lilly

Most commonly observed species in total (including Casual observations):

• White pine (Pinus strobus)
• Japanese maple (Acer palmatum
• Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus)
• Rosebay rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum)
• White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)

Most commonly observed species at Research Grade:

• Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus)
• White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)
• White pine (Pinus strobus)
• Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides)
• Rosebay rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum)

The deer sure were eager to participate and get counted in our BioBlitz! Great turnout everyone! Stay tuned for more updates coming this week.

Posted on October 31, 2022 12:05 PM by annkatrinrose