Monday Musings
Well it is all over for us. Thank you everyone who contributed the great data.
The Americas are still in full swing, but the Western World is now largely done for the City Nature Challenge 2021.
As we retire, we stand:
Observations: 54,177 observations, some 25,000 observations ahead of Washington in second place, and double that of any other city. But they still have their afternoons to catch up.
Species: 3082 species, 40 species ahead of Hong Kong. A tight contest, and an exciting total to watch over the ensuing days.
Observers: 1204 in position 5, over 700 short of San Francisco.
Now it is time for some sleep.
Later today, we will start identifications in earnest, although some of us still have photos to download over the coming week.
If you would like to make an early start on identifications, please use the curation tool.
preview it here: https://vimeo.com/246153496
At this stage we want to move the unidentified observations to a level where our experts can tackle them in Ernest. So please; Birds, or Mammals or Frogs, or Reptiles or Fish is great. Also Fungi (although please flag Lichens as lichens).
However, for plants, please disregard the iNaturalist instructions and do not make a "plant" ID: it does not get to the level needed by our experts. Please rather classify them as daisies, or proteas, or ericas, or grasses, or peas or orchids or whatever family you recognize. If you dont recognize it to family, then just skip it for someone who does. We will keep "plants" as a rubbish bin for stuff that cannot be identified. Dont worry if it might not a perfect ID: for instance the pea experts will know the pea-lookalikes and if not able to identify it, will be able to put it to genus or family if not quite right.
So please use this link:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?page=15&iconic_taxa=unknown&project_id=city-nature-challenge-2021-city-of-cape-town&place_id=any
At present there are 19,291 observations without any ID at all. We would like this to be close to zero by Thursday. Remember, identify as low as you feel comfortable: family, genus, species. If you dont know a plant to family or finer, skip it.
Two other points:
- if it is obviously planted, please mark it as planted. If you are not certain, do not mark it as planted as it removes the observation from the ID queue.
- If you see any observation or photo that is outstanding, lovely, exceptional, amazing or tickles your fancy, then please FAVE it. The fave button is in the middle bottom of the left hand panel in the curation tool. We will use the number of faves to guide us in choosing the observation of the 2021 City Nature Challenge for Cape Town. So if you see a deserving observation, please fave it. You may fave as many as you like, so dont hold back. Fave as many as you like.
More instructions will follow anon, but at this stage it is about getting the IDs to family or genus level.
19,291 to go ...
Comments
Thanks Tony! A remarkable push in first place again for the Capies. I only took less than 100 observations as I was pre-occupied over the weekend. As for next year I need a fancy fast phone to snap and load - my current one just sighs and goes flat. Nice.
HI Tony, how do I flag my lichen obs? I tried to add them to the Lichens of SA project but could not do it through batch edit.
ID them as "Lichens" - it should be Lecanoromycetes: the project then automatically includes them if they are identified as such.
To display the project on your observations, merely join the project.
If you dont join, the project wont display on the observation, but the observation will still be included in the project.
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