November Annotatathon!

Hello all!

Now the season is upon us when we can engage the UK hoverfly pile in battle! it's always more fun to work as a team, when we can support each other and see more progress getting made.

In that spirit I'd like to declare next weekend (Fri 24 - Sun 26) our first UK Syrphidae Annotatothon! Working together, let's how many sex and life stage annotations we can add over the course of the weekend.

We now have 72 members of the project - thank you! I am aware that people have joined the project for a variety of reasons - not all with the aim of adding annotations and IDs - and that's fine. But I'm after those of you who might like to have a go :-). I've said a few times that adding annotations is an easy way in to contributing to iNat data. So here's a few snippets of info that might encourage you!

Did you know? If everyone in this project annotated just 6 observations per week, that would be enough to keep up with the average rate of new UK hoverfly observations across the year, that's less than one per day! (9 per day and we'd keep up with the world!!) The same is true for IDs of course.

Currently, just over 30% of UK hoverfly observations have sex annotations, and the same for life stage. That's already an improvement since before the project started. About 50 000 remain unannotated. Let's see how far we can shift that dial next weekend! Any contribution large or small is welcome (we can't break down who did what anyway!)

For more information on how to do this see Determining and annotating the sex of hoverflies in iNat. And remember, the easiest way to add annotations is on the annotations tab on the identify page, using the keyboard shortcuts. 'la' for life stage=adult, 'll' for life stage=larva, 'lp' for life stage=pupa, 'sm' for sex=male, 'sf' for sex=female and 'sc' for sex=cannot be determined, cursor key to move onto the next observation.

Feel free to contact me or @rkl for help information or advice before or during the weekend. Tag one of us into an observation if you want another opinion.

Here are URLs that you can use next weekend:

All UK hoverflies needing sex annotation
UK hoverflies needing sex annotation, excluding the difficult groups

All UK hoverflies needing life stage annotation

Feel free to use the comments section below to discuss anything you want about this :-)

Happy annotating!

[PS This month I've managed to complete the annotation of all the Sphaerophoria observations in Europe: Have a look at the sex and life stage graphs on the Sphaerophoria taxon page to see how much benefit there is to data quality compared to a less well annotated genus like Eristalis (you'll have to filter to Europe or UK yourself if you're on the international site).]

Posted on November 17, 2023 03:39 PM by matthewvosper