This week's Observation of the week (cropped version featured on the home page of this project) is by Nova Patch.
The observation can be found on iNaturalist here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/82376288
Nova's social media accounts are as follows:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/novapatch
Twitter: https://twitter.com/novapatch
Please follow Nova on iNaturalist, Twitter, and Instagram.
Our new Observation of the Week is by Blacki Migliozzi. The observation was photographed during the most recent excursion by the NY Mycological Society at Alley Pond in Queens. Although Blacki doesn't yet have an iNaturalist account, his photography was brought to our attention through different means.
Blacki can be found on Instagram at:
https://www.instagram.com/blackili/
And on Twitter at:
This week's Observation of the week (cropped version featured on the home page of this project) is by Sue Zucker-Scharff.
The observation can be found on iNaturalist here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/83809952
Sue's social media accounts are as follows:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sue.zuckerscharff
Please follow Sue on iNaturalist and Facebook.
Although the Observation of the Week, changes each week, it doesn't seem fast enough. I post the OOTW each Sunday/Monday, but as I log into iNaturalist each successive day to see what is being observed and to try to glean the best image/observation for the following week (the OOTW is always from the previous Sunday-Saturday), I find that there are a plethora of new observations that could have been the OOTW for the previous week, but will be eclipsed by even newer observations by Saturday or Sunday (when the final decision is made).
So, although some observations (many of my own, because they are out of focus) have pictures that will not rate OOTW, many more just occur at the wrong time. Unless they stand out significantly, the newer observations tend to take the prize, so to speak.
The other problem I have encountered is scale. Sometimes the photos, which are mostly taken on a smartphone, do not scale well for the size of the image we would like. For instance, The image size for the project page banner is 760x320 pixels, the social media pages generally take a square image, while most of the original images are neither.
The Observation of the Month is posted as the NYMS collection group’s banner (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/nyms), on the society’s twitter page (https://twitter.com/newyorkmyc), and on our instagram feed (https://www.instagram.com/newyorkmyc/). Every observation is carefully attributed to the photographer who took the photo used (with their permission).
The following are the criteria used for selection of the OOTM:
The following criteria are used post-selection:
You can read about the process of choosing the OOTM here
The New York Mycological Society is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization dedicated to raising public awareness of mushrooms in science, cuisine, and more. http://newyorkmyc.org/
The New York Mycological Society is a mushroom club for all New Yorkers. It contains observations of fungi of New York's five boroughs as well as surrounding counties. The NYMS is a member, in good standing, of the North American Mycological Association (NAMA).
Interested? Find out more by visiting our website's about page: https://newyorkmyc.org/about/
An umbrella project on iNaturalist is a project that encompasses at least one other standard project (in our case, we cull all observations from The projects: Fungi beyond NYC - New York Mycological Society and Fungi of NYC - New York Mycological Society. The main purpose of umbrella projects is described by iNaturalist:
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If you want to collate, compare, or promote a set of existing projects, then an Umbrella project is what you should use. For example, the 2018 City Nature Challenge, which collated over 60 projects, made for a great landing page where anyone could compare and contrast each city’s observations. Both Collection and Traditional projects can be used in an Umbrella project, and up to 500 projects can be collated by an Umbrella project.
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The specific purpose of this project is to facilitate data analysis and to choose images for social media.
There are several recommended sources to learn more. Some are online and some are not. Instead of trying to reproduce the list of online resources here, below is a link to a living Google document that attempts to get as many resources into one place as possible:
This week's Observation of the Week is courtesy of Michael Sadler . He observed this on 6/26/2021. The genus/species is most likely Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae . You can find out more about this mushroom at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnosporangium_juniperi-virginianae
https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/gymnosporangium_juniperi-virginianae.shtml
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/gymnosporangium-juniperi-virginianae
Mushroom Expert:
https://www.mushroomexpert.com/trees/juniperus_virginiana.html
(which links to this page: http://www.midwestnaturalist.com/gymnosporangium_juniperi-virginianae.html)
Don't forget to follow Michael on iNaturalist: @masadler
