Observing is done, on to uploading & IDing!
Hey SF Bay Area! AMAZING job over the last 4 days going out and making observations! It's truly incredible what we can accomplish when we all work together, and not only did 1472 of us here in the Bay Area make 38,000 observations of 3100 species (so far!), but all together 16,000 people participated in making 385,000 observations of 16,500 species (so far!) around the world for the City Nature Challenge. So incredible.
So what's next? Well, we know many people were incredibly busy making observations Friday-Monday, and need some time to get them uploaded. We also know it takes time to get eyes on all these observations to try to confirm or refine the IDs. So, from now until 9am, Friday May 4, you should:
- Upload all your observations! As long as they were made April 27-30, you can upload them now and they'll still count for the City Nature Challenge.
- Help ID observations! Just like anyone can make observations, anyone can help with identifying observations. Here are all the observations made in the SF Bay Area for the City Nature Challenge that are not yet research grade! If you have some expertise or some naturalist know-how, feel free to help confirm IDs, correct mis-IDs, or try to take general IDs (e.g., "plants") down to more refined IDs (e.g., "California Poppy").
Our numbers will be pulled as final results at 9am this Friday, and results for the City Nature Challenge will be announced early afternoon that day!
Comments
We have already decimated the record number of species that Houston had last year - I didn't think 3,000+ was reachable! And we've exceeded it!
Looking at
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=16036&ttl=120&v=1524891024000&place_id=any&verifiable=any&view=observers
and sorting by species count, I see that we have a bunch of people who made observations, but who have no identified species. We can only see the top 500, so I suspect that there are hundreds of people who uploaded photos but who didn't or couldn't identify any of them. Might improve their experience a lot if we concentrate on those.
I just spent some time with IDs from the SF entries in the City Nature Challenge. There is A LOT of low-lying fruit, even with the commonest plants. I did a lot of work – yet only touched the surface – changing “unknown” entries into the most basic categories of “Plants,” “Flowering Plants,” “Insects,” etc. – which will make them easier to find and ID for people who know those taxa. Wish I could help out more, but I can only do this ad hoc for now due to work responsibilities.
There are still LOTS of observations without so much as a kingdom on them. I got a bunch this morning, but there are still over 1700 left:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?iconic_taxa=unknown&project_id=city-nature-challenge-2018-san-francisco-bay-area
Anybody with even a very tiny amount of knowledge can help get these moving.
Thanks for working on this, @dsacer & @gyrrlfalcon! We have until 9am tomorrow morning to ID and clean up the SF Bay observations as much as possible, so if anyone has some spare time today they can devote to IDing, marking things captive/cultivated, etc. - that would be awesome! THANK YOU!
@dsacer - I just did two pages of the "unknown" entries, and found some really easy ones (Common Pillbug, American Robin) and also had someone correct me when I took their entry to "Plants" - she was incensed that I'd not noticed the snake in the picture - which may well have been a new subspecies for our count! So there is much yet to be gained for those willing to spend a few minutes mucking around on those pages. Only 57 pages or so left here now - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?iconic_taxa=unknown&project_id=city-nature-challenge-2018-san-francisco-bay-area .
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