Fourth and Final Day in the Field

You know the routine by now: DC CNC four days in; final day of observations is finished. At 00:01 on Tuesday May 1, on the global leaderboard we are 4th for observations with 20,810, 8th for species with 1593, and 4th for observers with 831. Fantastic work everyone! And oh the things we have seen! More numbers will come in over the next few days as people get their observations uploaded and identified. I won’t even report on who’s in the lead for observations or species because it changes so much from moment to moment…except to point out that @mellis has in 4 days made 1,069 observations accounting for around 5% of our total, which is just amazing.

Make sure you upload all your photos and audio files as soon as possible! We have until Thursday night to upload, but the sooner you get your observations in front of everyone’s eyes and ears, the more likely you will be to get an ID.

YOU count as a participant if you submit only one observation, so thank you all for playing and for bringing your friends! All observations count whether they are Research Grade, Casual, Captive/Cultivated or even completely Unknown, so thanks to everyone for the images and sound files you have sent in (and will continue to send in until Thursday night).

As for species, I KNOW there are some species hiding in the thousands of as yet unidentified photos that will get our numbers up if we can get them identified to species. One quick way to do ID’s is to go to this screen:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?project_id=city-nature-challenge-2018-washington-dc-metro-area&place_id=any
If you open the filter you’ll see it’s set for “City Nature Challenge 2018: Washington, DC metro area” so you’re seeing only CNC DC observations. (I love seeing observations from around the world on iNat, but for this week, I’m sticking to CNC DC ID’s!)

On this screen you can quickly click “Agree” for the species you know well enough to recognize in a postage-stamp size image—redbud, flowering dogwood and mayapple, for example, jump right out at you. For trickier photos, you can click on any image for a larger view, but you may what to try this other approach: from the same screen open the first image, Agree, Identify or ignore it, and then while it’s still open press the right arrow key to quickly open the next one. You can also set the filter to show only taxa that interest you—birds or invertebrates or fungi, for example.

You can also do ID’s from your smartphone while you’re sitting, for example, in your dentist’s waiting room. For the iPhone, click the Explore icon at the bottom, set the map to the DC area by pinching and panning it, then click the three horizontal bars on the top to see images and which ones are not yet Research Grade. If you see one you can help with, click to open, click the … icon, and Agree or Suggest ID. If you tap Suggest ID the app will make auto suggestions, or you can type in your own idea.
If you just move the ID a notch closer to species, that helps. For Unknown observations, even calling it a bird or insect etc. will help because some identifiers are searching on those taxa.

Give it a try and help us get our observations to species by Thursday night! If you need any help, the Help section at the bottom of any iNat page is quite good, and some video tutorials are here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/video+tutorials

Posted on May 1, 2018 04:45 AM by dbarber