Sagehen's 2016 iNaturalist season was a great success!
Thanks to everyone who participated in the 2016 Sagehen Creek Field Station BioBlitz! Sagehen California Naturalists Lynn Hori and Ashley Phillips did a fantastic job organizing the event this year.
Yet again, we had a tremendous event, with 21 participants recording 246 observations of 107 species. This exceeded the numbers for 2015's inaugural BioBlitz and pushed our total species over 800, and our basin observations above 5,000. We even discovered and vouchered a plant that is new to the basin list.
Our total observations are now hovering just under 6,000. It would be great to pass that milestone before the end of the year, so get out there before the snow starts sticking, and if you are sitting on any old observations, please get them in.
This week, I posted highlights from researcher Katie Moriarty's 2008 camera trap photos. These are the same traps that discovered the first wolverine documented in California since 1922. The cameras also turned up a cute new mammal for the basin: a spotted skunk! Given that observers and researchers have been crawling all over this place for over 65 years, it's remarkable that no one ever documented (or even suspected) this fellow before. And it speaks to how powerful your iNaturalist observations can be!
