Three more days!

Good morning everyone!

Great job on the AppState BioBlitz so far! We're picking up speed but UNCG seems determined not to let us win this time and pulled ahead again. They are currently at 1,693 observations to our 1,467 followed by UNCW with 753. We are so far at about 41% of the observation count we had in our Fall 2022 BioBlitz week, with about 60% of the number of species we had in fall, so there's still more stuff to find. Let's get out there and look for additional things to observe today and over the weekend!

If you are ready for a change of scenery, we will have the gate open at the ASU Dark Sky Observatory tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon from 1-4 PM. Come on out to explore the woods around the Observatory! The forecast is calling for rain in the morning giving way to a sunny afternoon, so you may want to bring footwear suitable for muddy puddles and wet grass. For driving directions and free tickets for the North Carolina Science Festival's Statewide Star Party in the evening if you are interested, see the DSO website. (No tickets are needed for our afternoon BioBlitz outing! Those are for observing the night sky using the big telescope.)

I received a question about species numbers. Keen observers have noticed that the numbers in the umbrella project with the leaderboard differ from the numbers in the individual university projects. For example, it currently says we have 433 species in the leaderboard, but this project page says 497. What's the difference? Well, it's complicated but essentially the count on the project page includes taxa that have been identified to e.g. genus or family but have not yet been refined to species level IDs. Say, you have two observations, one with an ID of Rosaceae, another with an ID of Rosa multiflora. This counts as two "species" on the project page, even though only one of those IDs is actually at species level and the other is at family. The species counts on the leaderboard only consider observations identified to species. We are currently at 433 with UNCG leading with 466 and UNCW following with 323.

Species numbers can still change a bit as they are based on identifications being added to observations. Not every observation can be narrowed down to a species. Good quality pictures are often needed to clearly identify something. Some tips:

• Try to get your camera to focus on the right thing and if there are multiple organisms in the picture add a note to clarify which one you are observing.
• Get a picture of the whole plant/animal if you can, add a note on habitat as that might be important for ID (e.g. substrate a moss or lichen is growing on).
• Get close/zoom in for details (which details are important depends on the type of organism, e.g. for mushrooms you often need a view of the gills on the underside of the cap).
• Try to get a few pictures from multiple angles, e.g. dorsal and lateral views of insects.
• For flowers, also include pictures of stem and leaves as well - sometimes those provide the clues for identification.
• For trees, buds and leaves are important - a single picture of bark often is not sufficient to identify it.
• Once you have multiple pictures of an organism, it's important to combine them into one observation rather than upload them all separately.

The better quality our observations are, the more likely they will be identifiable to species and the more useful they are going to be to scientific projects!

Posted on April 21, 2023 11:57 AM by annkatrinrose