Happy Fall! Project to date and revisions

Good day, citizen naturalists!
It is now officially Autumn, and this seems to be a good time to pause and take stock of the Backyard Pollinators project.

As it stands now, the project contains 12,257 observations, including a total of 395* species of flower-visiting insects and birds (*not all of which are confirmed to be serving as pollinators.)

Going by iNaturalist's own statistics, the 10 most commonly observed pollinators in our project are:

1. Apis mellifera (Western Honeybee) 1,629 observations
2. Bombus vosnesenskii (Yellow-faced Bumblebee) 812 observations
3. Calypte anna (Anna's hummingbird) 457 observations
4. Bombus melanopygus (Black-tailed Bumblebee) 437 observations
5. Vanessa cardui (Painted Lady) 159 observations
6. Hylephila phyleus (Fiery Skipper) 133 observations
7. Ochlodes sylvanoides (Woodland Skipper) 121 observations
8. Bombus californicus (California Bumblebee) 121 observations
9. Xylocopa tabaniformis (Horsefly-like Carpenter Bee) 120 observations
10. Poanes melane (Umber Skipper) 116 observations

These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, because they only include pollinators that have been identified to the species level, and many times it is difficult if not impossible to make an accurate ID to the species level. For instance, the project currently includes an additional 791 observations of bumblebees in the subgenus Pyrobombus that could not be confidently identified to the species level. Most of them are probably Bombus vosnesenskii, but some of them might be the rarer but very similar-looking Bombus caliginosus or Bombus vandykei . There are surely other important yet difficult-to-identify pollinating insects that are also being under-counted.

Starting today, I made a change to the observation fields that will pop up when one submits an observation to the project. First, instead of using "Nectar plant" to identify the flower being visited, I am using the field "Nectar/Pollen delivering plant." This revision is long overdue, as flower-visiting insects are not always looking for nectar- pollen is also a rich food source for them, and many pollen-producing plants make little or no nectar. Older observations in the project will still say "Nectar plant" as there are thousands of observations and it will be quite an ordeal to change them all. Please take "Nectar plant" to imply "Nectar or Pollen plant" in this context. Secondly, the pop-up will no longer ask for "Flower shape" and "Flower cluster type" although those remain as optional fields in iNaturalist if you are using the desktop version. I feel the list of four fields was too cumbersome, especially for observers who are using the mobile app, and it was unneccesary to make each observer essentially re-invent the wheel by identifying, for example, the shape of a daisy flower. I've left the "Primary color" field, as that is a noteworthy fact that can vary between different individuals of the same genus or species.

Best,
Alexis Babayan
a.k.a. @alexisamphibian

Posted on September 24, 2019 08:59 PM by alexis_amphibian