IDENTIFICATION TIME

Noon Wednesday.
I trust that everyone has now uploaded all their observations. There may be a few outstanding, but time to turn our attention to identification in earnest.

But before that ...
Well done Cape Town
What a magnificent job. During planning we decided that based on past projections we would need:
60,000 observations, 5000 species and 3000 observers to top the leaderboard. Everyone balked at these suggesting that they were far too ambitious.
That will teach them!

• So we made 60,000 observations!! At noon today it was 61,729 - WELL DONE CAPE TOWN.
  I must confess that when I did my rounds of the Swartveld on Saturday I was extremely doubtful that people would contribute from such a bleak landscape: Only the Autumn Asters and Township Daises were in full flower, and the Swartland was black, and the Strandveld wilted and drab. And yet we done did it! A fantastic job, so give everyone a round of applause.

• Species-wise we did not make 5000 species, but we are only just into the IDs and we currently have 3,453 species (on the CNC umbrella summary), but 3,880 on our project page. We will use the project page as our summary, and so we are 120 from 4000, so we are certain to make that - perhaps 5000 during one of the driest end-summers (April rainfall anyway) on record, was a little ambitious. But we can make up during the Great Southern Bioblitz when things are actually flowering (although it is late in October, so it will depend on the rains). .
• Again, we failed to get our observer numbers. We will need to look into this. So an advance notice. 2022 will be about observers. So view the City Nature Challenge 2022 as a recruitment and awareness drive for your society. We managed just 1,268 observers: less than half our target. Still we made 5th place (at present), so not a bad result at all.

And dont forget that we were not alone. Just short of 50,000 observers worldwide contributed over one million observations (1,090,455) in 96 hours! A fantastic contribution to our urban biodiversity! Well done everyone, and hope that you had as much fun as we did.

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OK: Identifications.

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Currently we have:

• Desperately Needing an Identification. 17,702 observations:
  Help here:
  https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?page=25&iconic_taxa=unknown&project_id=city-nature-challenge-2021-city-of-cape-town
  Marine (477 observations):
  https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?page=4&iconic_taxa=unknown&place_id=138786&verifiable=any&d1=2021-04-30&d2=2021-05-03
  Anyone can help here! We need these marked as Bird, Mammal, Reptile, Frog or Fish: if you know the genus or species (yes you can use common names) please use that instead. But the aim is to get the observations to the expert level.
  It was too dry for fungi, just mark any mushrooms as Fungi, or lichens as Lichens.
  For plants though, please dont mark up as plants (I know the iNaturalist community promotes this). But for the CNC please try and get it to Family (e.g. daisy, orchid, pea, grass, erica, etc), or finer if you can - if you cannot, just skip them for someone else - dont ID as plant. That will get it into the realm of our specialists.

If you are a specialist, then please help with finer level identifications.
Please see the tips below:
They are (we will get more fussy soon: this includes those that need a confirmatory ID) - click on the blue link to help:

• Birds: 404 IDs needed (3,576 Observations, 193 species)
• Mammals: 260 IDs needed (549 Observations, 56 species)
• Reptiles: 97 IDs needed (544 Observations, 31 species)
• Amphibians: 77 IDs needed (208 Observations, 17 species)
• Insects: 2,220 IDs needed (3,098 Observations, 390 species)
• Mollluscs: 992 IDs needed (1,350 Observations, 181 species)
• Arachnids: 493 IDs needed (611 Observations, 66 species)
• Fungi: 516 IDs needed (538 Observations, 77 species)
• Mosses: 128 IDs needed (131 Observations, 15 species)
• Ferns: 341 IDs needed (406 Observations, 51 species)
• Monocots: 4552 IDs needed (5,289 Observations, 448 species)

• Dicots: 15,821 IDs needed (21,045 Observations, 1,845 species)
  (for the last two, add your family or genus into the species box)

• Trees: Trees Needing ID in CT CNC
• Marine: Marine Observations Needing ID in CT CNC (2,585 IDs needed (3,362 Observations, 557 species)

Tips

• Remember to fave any pictures-observations that you think qualify for consideration for observation of the CNC 2021 Cape Town. Everyone should fave at least 10 observations (and it is OK to include a few of your own)!
• Remember to mark planted and captive observations.
• Please tell users who posted too many species on an observation to split them. And those who overly split them: please ask them to join them up. And observations without pictures: please ask them to add some pictures. Use the Comments Box for these. Please help us curate the Challenge.
• The curation tool is really a useful and powerful tool. If you need a refresher on how to use it, then please see here: https://vimeo.com/246153496
• if there is a tree that needs identifying, add them to the tree project for the tree specialists: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/trees-of-southern-africa

Posted on May 5, 2021 11:06 AM by tonyrebelo