Y'all are awesome!

Good morning everyone and welcome to our second day of the AppState BioBlitz! When we started this, we were debating what our goalposts should be - 150 species, or 200, or should we be bold and say we're shooting for 300? Where do we stand right now? We are already at an amazing 346 species! And that's just day 1. Go AppState! (Note: The "species" count on the project page is even higher at 404, but that is because it is also counting observations not yet narrowed down to species and currently identified at genus or family level, for example).

It looks like a lot of you were really having fun with this yesterday - I saw a lot of students and even entire classes walking around campus with cell phone in hand taking pictures. Well over 1,000 observations were uploaded! It was a gorgeous evening to be out on the Greenway as well. Our top observed species after day 1 are a tie between white-tailed deer and the invasive oriental bittersweet with its brightly-colored fruits.

The first observation uploaded yesterday was common chickweed observed by mtoran. If you are the competitive type, based on the leaderboards on the project page the folks to beat currently are leighalobelia with over 100 observations already and currently the most species at 86, closely followed by dendro-julia and rivermont.

I received a couple of questions about iNaturalist and the most common one that came up is:

Q: How do I combine several pictures into one observation?

A: You should be able to do this in the upload window and there are video tutorials available both for the mobile app and the website interface. If you already have uploaded the pictures and they came through as separate observations, check out this help forum thread for suggestions what to do.

Why would you want to do this? Because it makes it much easier to identify your observations! For example, let's say you took a picture of a tree from a distance and a close-up of its bark and another of a fallen leaf. If you combine all three into one observation, it will be much easier to tell which species of tree it is compared to trying to ID each individual picture on its own.

Need help with iNaturalist?
I will be on zoom this evening (Tue., Oct. 25) from 5-6 PM for questions and to demo a few neat things you can do on the website.

I hope you have some more fun with this today!
Annkatrin

Posted on October 25, 2022 11:06 AM by annkatrinrose