Observations at Brandeis, Jan 15 - April 4 2018

How have participants been partitioning the natural world in their work for our project? As you can see, just over a third of observations were of flowering plants. Fungi, mosses, and conifers make another third, and animals the rest. Captive-cultivated observations are not included.

How many different species were observed? The next chart chart reveals that nearly half of the species are flowering plants. Mammals, on the other hand, made up 11 % of observations but now only 2% of species.

The last chart shows the percentages of observations representing a new species for this project, calculated by dividing the number of species by the number of observations. The higher the number, the less attention observers are paying them in proportion to the number of species out there--or else fewer new species would be found so often. The arthropods predictably appear to require the most attention due to high insect biodiversity.

What this suggests is that if we want to maximize the number of species found by the project, we may want to shift our attention further toward ferns and arthropods, and away from mammals and mosses (mammals simply have low biodiversity; mosses are diverse but won't get ID'd on iNaturalist).

Posted on April 4, 2018 04:32 PM by edanko