kelly_annec's Journal

This week I ended up going to Wunderlich County Park in Woodside on both Friday and Saturday. On Friday my phone had started to bug out and I was only able to make about a dozen or so observations in the span of about an hour and a half when my phone was working. I then got my phone fixed and went back on on Saturday with some family and I was able to walk the all of Bear Gulch trail and half of the Alambique trail. The whole walk took about three and half hours due to all the observations I got but getting the observations really made me more aware of how much fungi is part of nature. Overall it was so much fun going around and take picture of fungi, animals, and plants. I definitely recommend this park for anybody who just wants to get out.

This week, I figured out which observations I should put into my taxonomy table and got ready to finish the project. Other than that, there has not been much done. I have gone through all of my observations and then went to the species section in the observations. From there I inputted the restriction to only show research grade ones. Then I put them into their phylum group in a table on google docs. Other than that I started filling out the taxonomy table with a species from the phylum Chordata, a species from the phylum Arthropoda, and a species from the phylum Chlorophyta.

After getting the reminder that the iNaturalist project is close to over, I started checking if I have enough research-grade observations. I found that I do have over twenty-five research-grade observations but that I only had six phyla. I then went through my observations and felt that I was missing some observations so I went through my photos on my phone and found some pictures I had forgotten to upload. I now need to lookup more phyla around my area and make a plan to get more research-grade observations of them over the weekend in my area.

I ended up not doing any fieldwork during the last week. Instead, I have been working on my species report and going through classmates' observations. I first went to the project our class in under, and then I went into the observation tab. From there, I started to go through a good thirty or so observations from multiple classmates, and in most of them, I left feedback on what the species may be or if I agreed with the classifications so far. Honestly, I had more fun doing this than I thought, and I probably will continue to do this until the end of the project.

This week I didn’t do much compared to weeks past and only got to plan a day to go to tide pools for next week in half moon bay. So other than some observations while walking around, I have went to some places to take more photos of observations that only had one photo. Those observations were mostly plants and fungi from water dog lake trail that I only got one photo of them when walking last time.

This week I did a few things to fix up my observations while also adding some new ones. I have added the photos I took of some species and added them into the observation I made through seek. I do this by sending the pictures to my computer then uploading them onto their observation. I have also added some more detail on their location if it was not uploaded. I also went into the field and got some more observations while in San Luis Obispo that included the Western Gull (Larus occidentalis), California Gull (Larus californicus), Dungeness Crab (metacarcinus magister), and a type of sea plant that I have yet to clarify its species. I also got an observation of a species I found elsewhere, the California Ground Squirrel (Otospermophilus beecheyi) and Gold Dust Lichen (Chrysothrix candelaris). I got these observations at Morro Rock beach and the town of Morro Bay., which is only a fifteen-minute drive from the Cal Poly SLO campus.

When I went down to Kirby beach near the camping site off of one of the trails in Kirby Cove, my brother found a deceased Yello Rock Crab. To get to the trail, one has to go off of Conzelman Road after the roundabout on the one way. Then to get to the beach, you have to go down the trail surrounded by abandoned bunkers, trees, and birds. My brother and the people we were with were trying to find pretty rocks and shells while I was taking pictures of other species. Once I was finished, I went over to them and saw that my brother had a crab in his hand. I asked him to hold it while I used the seek app to identify the crab species and found it is an introduced species with the scientific name Carcinus Maenas and part of the phylum Arthropods.

I found a few rockweeds when I went on a hike with some friends at Kirby Cove. They were on Kirby beach near the camping site that we reached after walking one of the trails off Conzelman Road. We parked on Conzelman Road after the roundabout on the one way. During the hike, there were a few other species of plants and birds along the way, with abandoned bunkers off the trail. I used the seek app to identify the plant and found that it is a native plant with the scientific name Fucus distichus and part of the phylum Ochrophyta.