Archivos de diario de diciembre 2021

16 de diciembre de 2021

I've Been Thinking

And those of you who know me in real life know that I'm good at getting myself in trouble once I start thinking - for some definitions of trouble.

So, I just participated in an ID blitz: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/id-blitz-december-2021, which concentrated on Unknowns and Kingdom-level observations. It was loads of fun! I worked solely on Unknowns and made more than a thousand IDs over the course of the 48 hours. In total, 54 people made almost 31,000 identifications for the blitz.

But it got me thinking: what if we concentrated on making identifications that moved observations to Research Grade, and thus out of the Needs ID pile? The enormous Needs ID pile, to be exact.

I'm thinking of organizing a two-day ID-a-thon focusing on moving observations to Research Grade in New England, probably sometime in February. Anybody up for helping out? We could concentrate on plants, if that's what people prefer, or keep it wide open (anybody out there know your bacteria to the species level?). Right now, there are just over 560,000 species-level observations in New England that need IDs, 296,000 of which are Plants. (Assuming I've filtered properly; feel free to correct me!). By "species-level," I mean that someone, usually the observer, has narrowed the ID down to a particular species; these observations aren't stuck at Kingdom or Genus or anywhere in between. One more ID could bump these to Research Grade.

I'm happy to set up the project, write journal posts to keep up the enthusiasm, provide some help with how to make IDs if you've not done it before, and try my best to figure out how many IDs we all make, etc., etc.

Any questions? I'm happy to answer any question as best as I can, or find out the answer elsewhere, if there is an answer.

Publicado el diciembre 16, 2021 03:26 TARDE por lynnharper lynnharper | 6 comentarios | Deja un comentario