Recording observations of newt roadkill other than Lexington
@merav, @newtpatrol, @anudibranchmom, @sea-kangaroo, @joescience1, @karangattu, @tyap:
Merav suggested that we have a project for recording newt roadkill other than those at Lexington. Robin posted ~120 observations from Henry Coe State Park this season - they are included in this project.
Merav, do you want to include the Chileno Valley newt roadkill too?
Right now I have the project boundaries set to San Francisco Bay Area. Merav, is this OK with you? If you join the project, I can make you a curator and then you can change the boundaries, if you want.
Comments
Sounds good to me. I think there's no need to include Chileno Valley, as someone is already following that one. I thought this project could be useful to identify other problematic locations, such as, apparently, Coe Park.
Notes:
On 12/21/23 I changed this project from an old-style one that required users to manually add observations to the project to a Collection Project, which automatically adds dead newts. Two Places are excluded:
** Chileno Valley Road Laguna Lake Newt Crossing
** Lexington Reservoir County Park, CA, US
However, if people use a location other than these exact locations, they will be automatically included in this project.
Also note that the Chileno Valley project allows observations from all around the Chileno Valley, Petaluma, and surrounding areas - not just within the boundaries they've defined in the above Place. And members of their team use lots of different locations (e.g., "Marin County, USA").
Despite these limitations, I think this is an improvement over the old way of recording newt roadkill outside of our project boundaries.
Thanks, Anne!
What have you found out so far? Did we lose some observations? I'm guessing not all observations are set as "dead", therefore won't get into our project?
@merav, I've set a restriction on this project so only dead newts get added. However, some of these might not be dead because of roadkill.
So far I've observed the following:
Now the project only contains dead newts; before there were several live newts included
The number of dead newts in this project has almost doubled. Before, there were about 667 observations by 4 people. Now there are 1,176 observations by 162 people.
4 red-bellied newts have been found dead. The location(s) are obscured due to its vulnerable status.
The roadkill problem around Chileno Valley is much more extensive than the small section of road they've designated for their project. It looks like people from miles around are adding their newt observations to that project. If you look at the map for this project, you can see what I mean.
Do you remember the problem we have where the GPS puts observations that should be on Alma Bridge Rd. in other locations? Well, those observations are included in this project, unfortunately, so there may be a double count (this project and Lexington project).
That's all for now. I'll update this list if I find out more info.
Thanks, Anne!
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