Second day of the BioBlitz!

If you just joined the project, welcome to the team! We've got some stiff competition this time around, so we can certainly need your help! It looks like UNCG learned a few things from us last fall and got off to a great start taking the lead for now. AppState was a bit slow getting this going and trailing behind both UNCG and UNCW yesterday. Can we turn this around today? We're off to day 2 of our campus BioBlitz and it looks like another gorgeous sunny spring day out there! So grab your phones and cameras and see what biodiversity you can find! So far, we have reached the 200 observations and 100 species markers. Let's see if we can kick this up a bit!

A few tips and reminders:
The main purpose of this competition is to collect biodiversity data for our campuses. This citizen science data may be pulled into GBIF and other databases to be used by researchers worldwide to e.g. investigate species ranges, diversity etc. Therefore, it's important to make it as accurate as possible. For better science!

• If you are uploading pictures from your computer/camera, please double-check and verify that the dates and locations on your postings match where you took the picture, not when and where you are uploading it to iNaturalist. If you are not sure exactly where something was on the map, you can draw a circle to encompass the site where you likely made the observation. I'm seeing some outdoors observations posted with locations given as inside buildings.
• If you post observations of stuff that was planted, please remember to mark it cultivated (not wild). I know this will make it not count in the BioBlitz, but for research purposes it is important to sort out naturally occurring species (for range maps, to track invasives etc.) vs. stuff that was put there by humans (inventory of plants used by our landscaping crews). Planted stuff will still count for the Watauga County BioBlitz but should all be marked "not wild".
• If you are adding IDs, please make sure that you are certain it is that species before pushing something to "Research Grade". It's fine to take a bit of a guess or use the computer suggestion for the initial ID, but once things get to the green "Research Grade" label, they are pulled into GBIF and other such repositories for actual research projects, so we want to make sure our IDs are as good as they can be for that.
• Please try to avoid posting pictures that include identifiable humans. Remember iNaturalist is a public website and anyone in the world can see the pictures you are posting. At the very least, you should ask the people in your pictures for consent before posting them here as this is a potential invasion of their privacy. Homo sapiens observations are treated as casual by iNaturalist and will not count towards our BioBlitz totals.

Posted on April 18, 2023 12:55 PM by annkatrinrose