Haven't committed to the extent of adding UI for it. Holler if you find this useful. Obvious doesn't deal with situations where people ID things at a high level, e.g. lichens ID'd as "Fungi" are going to appear in that non-lichenized fungi search. Also, since this is based on IDs, these URLs will break after drastic, high-level taxon changes, but there shouldn't be too many of those. Also have not added this to obs search, just Identify.
Someone from KQED just contacted me about finding some slime molds to film in the Bay Area this weekend. Anyone out there know of good spots / want to lead them around? @ang, @damontighe, @moonlittrails, looking in your direction...
And, you know, with many interesting organisms among the green. Point of interest: the Nexus 5X takes fine panoramas, but the interface is a bit horrible, like using a point-and-shoot in 2007 or something. Dear Google (or LG), the panorama has been solved. Go try an iPhone. Or a Motorola.
I usually meet up with @charlie in Connecticut over the holidays, but since there are actually some more people in the area these days, I was wondering if others might be interested in a larger meetup, probably on 12/26 or 12/27. @kellyfuerstenberg, @karolina, @mickley, @berkshirenaturalist, @johnpand@jonathan, @benedictgagliardi, @kjhurme, @rmedina, any interest? If we do it somewhere coastal like Hammonasset maybe we could tempt @invertzoo up from NYC! Any other recommendations regarding locations?
Hey folks, following our last happy our in SF, we're doing another in Oakland:
Tuesday December 15, 2015
5pm - 7pm (or however long you want to stay)
Lost & Found 2040 Telegraph Ave
Oakland, CA 94612
b/t 21st St & 20th St
It's only a few blocks from 19th St. BART, so hopefully relatively accessible. Anyway, summon the troops! A semi-random list of people I can think of in or around the East Bay:
Christian just told me about this thing called tenkara: ultra lightweight fly fishing for small fish in small mountain streams. Then he told me about microfishing: using really small tackle to catch really small fish. But also! This thing called species fishing: fishing to catch as many species as you can, not just the biggest or tastiest fish you can. Amazing. Anyone out there actually do these things?
Just a few quick notes that I may expand upon later: this place is sweet, beautiful clear creek, lots of serpentine and cool plants. Sort of doable as a day trip from the Bay Area, but you could also camp at the Forest Service campground just west on Goat Mtn. Rd. or at East Park Reservoir just east of Lodoga.
Goat Mountain Rd is dirt but totally doable for a 2WD sedan. There are numerous pullouts, though many of them are at the bottom of steep cliffs, so beware falling rocks. If you plan to leave via Lodoga Leesville and Leesville roads, those are also dirt, but also doable. Just slow (but beautiful).
There are some game paths back into the RNA, but it's mostly bushwhacking across steep hillsides, loose gravel soil, and/or through dense cypress forest by the creek or dense manzanita chaparral. There is plenty to explore along the road, though.
This place is probably pretty good for butterflies. I wasn't having much luck with photography, but I definitely had Two-tailed and Pale Swallowtails, and sisters down around the creek, a checkerspot (Edith's?), a white (Spring?), a duskywing (Sleepy?), and Anise Swallowtails hilltopping. I didn't see Indra, but it seems like it could be there. Also didn't see Lomatium marginatum, but there were other Lomatium species. Missed the MacNab cypress, supposedly on the ridges. Probably walked by it without noticing.
I really only saw one dragonfly and handful or damselflies, which was a bit surprising. Might be better later in the year.
Plants were pretty good. Things like jewelflowers and milkweeds either hadn't flowered yet or were just beginning, same with many of the stream-side species, so a later visit might also be productive. Earlier could also be good, as there were numerous fritiilaries in fruit.
I had an absolute blast exploring the Mojave Desert with Tony, Danielle, Taj, and V last weekend, and my brain is still sort of there. I've been down that way numerous times, but usually I head down earlier for the flowers, which means I've been missing all the amazing reptiles. On previous trips I wasn't quite as obsessive about documentation, either, so pouring over all the photos I took is helping me appreciate this alien (to me) landscape better than I have previously.
I've also been re-reading Allan Schoenherr's excellent A Natural History of California, a tome I've seen on many shelves and that I read from extensively when I first moved here 12 years ago, and it's been helpful in understanding the different abiotic forces at play in the desert, as well as the different vegetational communities. The notion, for instance, that ecological zonation is driven more by soil types than by elevation is interesting. Creosote Bush Scrub was legion, of course, and we got to walk around in it at Red Rock Canyon State Park, Desert Tortoise Natural Area, and almost every time we stopped the car to look at something. Joshua Tree Woodland was also super obvious, and basically surrounds the campground at Red Rock Canyon. We got up into some Pinyon / Juniper areas around Hole-in-the-Wall in Mojave National Preserve (~4000 ft elevation), though you could hardly call it a forest. The area around Hole-in-the-Wall was particularly interesting, with a yucca (Mojave AND banana, apparently) and cactus-based vegetation on the south side of the mesa (or is it a butte?) and a different community on the north side with smaller, gray shrubs I haven't ID'd yet, but also turpentine broom (Thamnosma montana). There was also catclaw acacia up at Hole-in-the-Wall, with its attendant mistletoe, which we didn't see at Red Rock.
Kelso Dunes was pretty amazing, if anything more amazing than my memories of my last visit 11 years ago. Fringe-toed Lizards were everywhere, as well as numerous plants I was at a loss to ID in the field (certainly an interesting Astragalus, and maybe some desert lilies). We saw TONS of tracks, tons, including a really cool one that looked like a bike tread but was probably made by a beetle. I really want to go back to a desert dune like this at night and see who's making the tracks.
We spent a lot of time exploring washes, since they often had the most life, from blooming flowers to insects to birds to herps. Zebra-tailed Lizards and Desert Iguanas certainly seemed to prefer them. The wash by the lava flows on Kelbaker Rd was particularly productive. That was where we saw Desert Iguana feeding on the buds of desert senna, along with numerous leps (one black and white one eluded me, next time...). I spent a pleasant hour or two lying under a shrub at the edge of the wash below the campground at Hole-in-the-Wall, and was rewarded by a visit from some Gambel's Quail. I think the many Poor-wills we heard at night may have been using those flat areas as well.
Anyway, a grand time. One major revelation was that Red Rock Canyon and the western Mojave are really only (only!) 6 hours away, meaning it could theoretically work as a weekend trip. What other kinds of habitat could I sample in that area? Are there dunes to visit in the west? Limestone outcrops? Shadscale scrub, or alkali flats?
Also, does anyone know where I can find some decent geologic and vegetation zone maps of the Mojave? These RGMP maps are ok, and are also available as Google Maps overlays, but the lack of machine-readable data is frustrating. Haven't found veg maps but haven't looked very hard either. The state of publicly available geodata in California is, if anything, worse than it was 10 years ago, which is pretty sad, considering this is not actually a particularly difficult problem, and other states seem to manage it just fine, including equally giant states like Texas and minuscule states like Connecticut. C'mon, people.
Posted on
April 05, 2015 11:40 PM
by
kueda
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228 observations
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From left to right, Helminthoglypta nickliniana, Helminthoglypta arrosa, Haplotrema minimum
A little while ago I was talking with my co-worker Rebecca and we were lamenting the fact that so much knowledge about the natural world is locked up in the brains of a few, not because they guard it jealously, but because these tidbits are either too minor and disjointed to be publishable as scientific research, or because they are qualitative, or seem obvious to the experts. What a shame! We felt like every time we had the privilege to go out into the field with these kinds of people, they would reveal amazing facts about the predatory habits of parasitic wasps, or where to find butterflies in the rain, along with wonderful stories about how they came to know these things, but the only way for others to know them would be to find them out for themselves, or walk around with an expert for a few hours.
So we came up with an idea: why not start a biodiversity oral history project to record these facts and stories, along with the voices of the people who told them to us. At a bare minimum, we could start recording these conversations we were having and post them online, but at a resplendently-attired maximum we could publish these recordings alongside written, searchable transcripts, with photos and/or video recorded during these hikes. To give these walks a bit of structure beyond just having conversations, we could organize the projects around making very local field guides, so the ostensible point of the walks would be for the expert to introduce the recorder to the topic of the guide and seek out the organisms in question, and the recorder would record everything the expert said during the walk, take pictures of the organisms they found, do some research based on what they learned, and assemble the guide in collaboration with the expert.
We talked with Heather, the Academy's chief librarian, and she thought it sounded like a good idea and had thoughts about how to host the data and do the transcription, and maybe even fund it, but first we had to try it! I know embarrassingly little about mollusks despite my love of nudibranchs, so I suggested we start with the land snails of San Francisco, and Heather had just the expert in mind: Neil Fahy, retired geologist, avid amateur malacologist, Academy research associate, and longtime San Franciscan.
To start things out, I wanted to follow a model like this:
Sit down inside with the expert, talk about what species need to go in the guide, and decide where to go look for them.
Go look for the organisms and photograph the heck out of them!
Meetup
So, Neil and I set up a meeting at the Academy and talked about snails! He told me he'd deposited his manuscript on Bay Area snails at the Academy, and recommended some other literature for me to check out (which I later did), and we planned a hike to go look for snails. Neil recommended Crystal Springs Reservoir / San Andreas Lake as a decent spot, which is owned by the city of San Francisco, even though it's outside the city limits, so we set a date.
I went through Neil's manuscript and a checklist of SF snails he sent me that was exported from Roth and Sadeghian and used that for the skeleton of the guide using iNaturalist Guides. It became immediately apparent to me that Helminthoglypta was an important and diverse group of native California snails, but they all kind of looked the same, so I was eager to get out in the field and learn about them.
In the field
Neil and I met up at San Andreas Lake in Millbrae, I set him up with a recorder, and we started walking. My recording setup was not terribly sophisticated, and the recording shows it! I just took a pair of earbud headphones with an inline mic, paperclipped it to Neil's jacket so the headphones were tucked away and the mic was exposed, and plugged them into a smartphone, which I put in Neil's pocket. I did the same for myself so I could mix together both audio tracks if Neil's didn't capture my side of the conversation (it did a decent enough job). The apps I was using were Voice Recorder Pro on my iPhone and Smart Voice Recorder on an Android phone. I gave Neil the Android phone figuring I would want to use mine for photos and such, but I think that was a mistake b/c the Audio quality ended up being worse, regardless of mic placement. That may have just been the device though, which was a 3+ years old. Also, the paperclip wasn't really the best fastening device. So main technical findings for recording were
Give your best setup to the expert
Cheap headphones with a mic are fine, but use one of those bigger black, clamshell-like clips instead of a paperclip
Record compressed audio! Uncompressed audio files get big fast
Overall I think it went great. We only found 3 snail species, but I learned a ton in the process, particularly about those Helminthoglypta species, which can be separated in the field (H. arrosa is much more common and generally has an open umbilicus, while H. nickliniana usually has a closed umbilicus and has a distinct, regular pattern of oblique ridges on the shell, though you'd need a sharp macro shot or a hand lens to see them).
Follow up
Of course I also learned a bunch going through my photos and revisiting some of the literature on the species we saw. Pilsbry, for instance, is an amazing resource with a great deal of detail on Californian species, including photos and very detailed locality data.
Reviewing the audio was pretty time-consuming, I have to admit. I was hoping to just upload the file to soundcloud and use it for annotation, but I think that would put me over my free quota, so I turned to Audacity, which isn't quite as nice to look at, but get's the job done for file format conversion, syncing multiple audio tracks, and annotation using label tracks. Pretty amazing open source tool, frankly. The main challenge was that I had 6 hours of audio to review! Audacity makes it easy to skip around to where people are talking, and I made labels for all sections where Neil was talking about snails or something else I found interesting. I've included a few tracks here for you to check out.
So first of all I need to sit down with Neil again, and look at the remaining species and think about where to find them, and then we need to do so.
I'd also like to peruse the Academy's collections with Neil and photograph some of the species that don't have licensed or public domain photos online. The Academy also has a number of slides of terrestrial mollusks that I'd like to try digitizing.
Also wondering what role journaling should play in this process. I'm taking a few text notes from our discussions, but maybe blogging would be a better, more open way to do that.
Posted on
January 09, 2015 01:38 AM
by
kueda
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19 observations
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15 comments
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Despite the rain we managed a decent species count this year. Tony and Ralph were again my stalwart companions, despite the threat of rain. Counts were way down, probably due to the weather. The area around the creek in Parkway was mostly cleared, partially with fire, and the creek bank was highly eroded so there wasn't much cover. We didn't see any of our usual aquatic birds (Mallard, Snowy Egret, Kingfisher, snipe), and I suspect this might be why.
Unbelievably low numbers of Yellow-rumped Warbler, again perhaps due to weather. Usually I'm sick of seeing them by the end of the day. Unusually high numbers of robins, in the 100s, and our first Varied Thrushes for this count.
