Happy Winter Solstice from the Empire State Native Pollinator Survey team! We've now downloaded and played with the project data (so fun!) and have some results to report back. Spoiler alert: It was a great first year.

iNaturalist provides some summary statistics and "leader boards" showing top observers, most commonly observed species, a map of the project's observations. For those of you interested in going a bit deeper, below I report some additional simple summaries of the project data through Dec. 17. They have useful things to tell us about how and where to focus our work in 2019 and 2020.

Notable finds
A highlight of this first year was the observation of the yellow-banded bumble bee (Bombus terricola), a species petitioned for federal listing, at two locations. Other bumble bees thought to be rare in NY turned up with some regularity, but it would be premature to infer anything about their status. In future years we hope to be able to highlight additional exciting finds around the state, but such is the early state of our knowledge of many of these species that we're still determining what makes a notable find!

Taxonomy
Nearly two-thirds of the observations were of our "focal taxa"--species groups we are targeting in our systematic surveys and museum work. These include sphinx moths (family Sphingidae), flower moths (genus Schinia), bees (suborder Anthophila), hover flies (family Syrphidae), bee flies in the genus Bombylius, hairy flower scarab beetles (genus Trichiotinus), and flower longhorn beetles (subfamily Lepturinae). Those 1,385 observations broke down among species groups as follows:

• Coleoptera (beetles): 103 observations of at least 20 species
• Diptera (flies): 265 observations of at least 31 species
• Hymenoptera (bees): 831 observations of at least 62 species
• Lepidoptera (moths): 186 observations of at least 32 species

We are thrilled by all the bee observations coming in, but it would be great to get the numbers up for the other taxa. Do you know anyone with an interest in pollinating flies, beetles, or moths? Please turn them on to this project!

Data Quality
Just over two-thirds of these observations of focal taxa have attained Research Grade, which means they have a date, location, and species-level identification shared by two or more users. That means we all still have some work to do! If you are an expert in any of these groups, or know experts, let's see if we can get identifications made and/or confirmed for these focal taxa. Research Grade observations are far more useful to our project than those of a lower quality rank.

Geography
A glance at the project map on the home page shows that observations came from all over New York. It's gratifying to see observations spread so widely, as our project is statewide. Some areas of the state had far more observations than others, reflecting in part some particularly active observers, and in part the highest densities of people. While any analysis of these data will have to take into account the geographic spread of observer effort, it would be great to even out that effort to the degree possible. For those of you willing to make observations away from home, we are especially interested in obtaining data from (so far) underrepresented areas of New York: much of Long Island; the southwestern Adirondacks, the Adirondack High Peaks, the St. Lawrence Valley, the Southern Tier, and Western New York between Rochester and Buffalo. Good counties to target would be Fulton, Genesee, Lewis, Montgomery, and Orleans (zero observations of focal taxa so far); and Cortland, Herkimer, Madison, Nassau, and Tioga (one focal taxon observation each so far). We'll be working to reach local naturalists in these areas too.

Full disclosure: There are observations of the focal taxa in some of those regions on iNaturalist--just not as part of this project. We have another way of gathering other observations, but are happiest when observations are associated with ESNPS.

Thanks again for all the great work in 2018. Have a wonderful holiday season.

• Matt