Happy Valentine's' Day
So, back to the question of our survey effort in 2021... There were several steps of forward and back. As one way to start. I selected several peak years.
You can see that cherry-picking years isn't apples to apples (sorry). The years most like 2021 were the recent survey years, so after some other starts and stops I ended up with an average of Species and Observations for the years 2016-2020. Next graphed those averages against 2021. Here are the charts on # Observations and # Species recorded for the standard date intervals. For Observations, this is stack of 2021 to the average. Species is shown as a line.
Looks like we're in the zone. Putting these together...
Observations and the number of species track together, peaking in June. Moving forward the recent years average will provide a baseline to compare current individual years.
Compared to the average, across the periods, 2021 had a little better numbers, about an 3% increase in the number of species and about a 28% increase in observations. Good effort.
Comments
Very nice. I especially like the plot of # of species vs week of the year. The last plot is interesting. I would have expected a closer correlation between total observations and number of species detected. Maybe this means finding a species is not a random event...if you know where they live you can find them...even if only in small numbers.
Would it be helpful to compare with other dragonfly and damselfly survey efforts? For example in other states, or a federal survey of some sort?
Sure, it would be a matter of having the data.
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