iNat Worldwide BioBlitz (iNat Summer Hunt) 2024's Journal

Hello! It has come to my attention that with the name "Summer hunt" and the time constraints given that the southern hemisphere is not included. Now, all related projects are part of the iNat Worldwide BioBlitz, which I hope is a title I can use. Each project will now have (iNat Summer Hunt) in it to show its former name for better identification of the project. Thank you!

Reminder to join the project for 2025's competition! https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/inat-worldwide-bioblitz-inat-summer-hunt-2025
Also, join the project to see competition totals! https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/inat-worldwide-bioblitz-inat-summer-hunt-totals

The first iNaturalist Summer Hunt has ended! Thank you for everyone who participated!!!
This was so much more of a success than I could have hoped for in the first year- 120,000 observations by 40 people is amazing!
While you all post your final observations from the timeframe, I will work on a more detailed statistics journal post- which should be ready by next week, to give everyone time to get the final observations in!

If you found a species that was a first recorded on iNat, like my observation of Machimus autumnalis or juan_sphex's observation of Fumariphilus versicolor, please share it in the comments! Also share rarer or uncommon observations that I can put in the stats post- some are difficult to find on my own.

Make sure to join for 2025's competition!

With just about 30 days left, I am excited to announce we as a project have added over 100,000 observations to iNaturalist! And with 64% of them being Research Grade (64,540), we have added many quality observations! I am stunned at the amount of reach we have had just in the first year- we have observations from around 11 countries- and I cannot wait to see what next year holds!

If you have any suggestions for changing things next year, please feel free to share!

We are a little over halfway done with this year's Summer Hunt! I cannot believe the amount of observations that this small group has made in the past few months, it is amazing to see how many different species there are! I am proud to say that this will continue next year as well; the 2025 iNaturalist Summer Hunt Project has been made almost a year in advance! Be sure to join it if you would like to participate next year, I would say it's better to join now than to possibly forget later.

In 2025, my goal for the event is to be able to reach more people and more places than this year has so far. It would be great to reach the southern hemisphere, which shockingly has not been a part of the competition yet.

Thank you for everything you have done to make this a great first year for this event, and keep on observing!

Here is a heat map of all observations in the project. It will update as more are added so this will always be up-to-date.

Heat Map

The iNat Summer Hunt will be a yearly occurrence. To keep track of everything, an umbrella project has been created, called iNat Summer Hunt Totals.

This isn't much of a news post, but more of a reminder that it is soon happening!

Thank you to those who have already joined and want to participate. For the first year, we already have a great group of people participating!

With that, be safe and have fun!

As you probably have seen, there are many people on iNaturalist who will post plants and animals that have grown or live in captivity/were cultivated. Additionally, there are many posts that have no media along with them. This is a fair competition, and we want to make it so everyone has a fun experience. We do not accept observations with no image/media or observations that are casual grade. These are filters already built into the project, but this is written for everyone's understanding.

Hello everyone!
This is a quick reminder to join the discord server for this project. Here's the server!
Joining the discord server helps out a lot! It is the only place where you can ACTUALLY join, and it allows you to get notified about what is happening quicker and allows you to socialize with other members!
About the joining process: Once you join the server, you can go to the announcements channel, and click on the thread to format a message with your iNat user.
(Sadly don't know how to put images in).

If you cannot join the server, it is okay, and I will add you without the confirmation. It is a helpful thing to use, though.

If you do not speak English I am sorry, most of this will be English because I am not fluent in any other languages. If I could get someone who does to help out, that would be great.

Hello, iNaturalists!
Today marks the creation of a new, worldwide bioblitz: the iNat Summer Hunt! It is a worldwide, summer-long* competition to find and observe the most species.
2024 is the iNat Summer Hunt's first year running. The goal is to help encourage iNaturalist users, new or experienced, to participate in a fun, simple event. Starting March 1st and ending September 30th, 2024, there is time to observe, explore, and have fun while you do your normal day-to-day activities.
Website for the event: (https://inatsummerhunt.my.canva.site/about-the-bioblitz)
iNaturalist project for the event: (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/inat-summer-hunt-2024)
Discord server for the event: (https://discord.gg/AdvwZKENZv)

*technically runs from spring to around fall.