Nearing 1500 RG species in Florida
This past month, in a process that took DOZENS of hours -- far more than I had budgeted -- I prepared my FLORIDA LIFE LIST for all taxa that have been research-graded on iNaturalist. I have updated the spreadsheet whenever I photograph a new species. I have tried to be 100% accurate, but some non-species can be RGed -- things like Whirligig Beetles or "Mason and Potter wasps," so it's a bit difficult to determine precisely how many RG species I have. (Clearly, I need to add but tally separately all the RGed "non-species").
This past Saturday, Valeri Ponzo, Don Fraser, and I traveled to San Felasco Hammock Preserve State Park in Alachua County, and then on Sunday, Val and I visited Arthur Engle Memorial Park in Pasco County and the Big Cypress Boardwalk in Goethe State Forest in Levy County. NO DOUBT these 330+ photographs will put me over the top for 1,500 RGed species in Florida.
Once I achieve this goal, I really have no goal left to achieve, other than seeing how many RGed species I find in Florida before I die (whenever that will be). If I have at least several years of life left, then I would like to upload to iNat EVERY nature photograph or audio recording that I have ever taken. That probably amounts to at close to 40,000 photographs, of which I have uploaded perhaps 10,000 so far.
At the moment (1933 on 27 Mar 2023), I have 7.103 records of 1,764 species from Florida -- I have not yet uploaded records from any other region in the world -- of which 6,283 records and "1,509" records are RGed. That's great, except that it means that I have 788 records of potentially 423 species that remain non-RGed. I don't like that at all. Maybe I'll delete a lot of the non-RGed species, since I see little value in them sitting in a review queue in perpetuity, or they have already been determined to represent records that cannot be identified to species. I dunno.
Anyway, in the next few days, I'll post my >1,500-RGed species total once I exceed it.
