So much fun! Now can you help with identifications?

Hi SF Bay Area CNC friends!

I hope you all had a wonderful time out exploring nature over the past four days – perfect weather, lots of fun events, most places actually still green – what more could we ask for??

Now that the observation period of the CNC is done, we have until 9AM Monday, May 9 to do two main things:

1. Get all your observations from April 29 - May 2 uploaded; and
2. Work on identifying all the observations!

If you're a veteran identifier then head on over to the Identify tool to see all the SF Bay Area CNC observations that are not yet to Research Grade.

If you haven't yet jumped into the identifying side of iNaturalist, please know that anyone can help with identifications! You don't have to be an expert, one great place to start is to look at all the observations that were uploaded with no ID at all (so they're listed as "unknown"), and help by adding even high-level IDs, like "Plants" or "Insects" or "Birds" – whatever level you feel confident to ID to (e.g., you could do "grasses" instead of "plants" or "beetles" instead of "insects" if you feel confident in doing so!). That way the folks who know how to ID those particular taxa can find them faster! Click here to see all the SF Bay Area CNC observations currently listed as "Unknown".

And as you're working on identifications, if you happen across an observation that is clearly of a non-wild organism (e.g., fish in an aquarium, potted plants, etc.), help us clean up the data by marking them as Captive/Cultivated.

If you'd like to hang out (virtually) with some other local folks while working on identifications, local naturalist extraordinaire Trent Pearce (@leftcoastnaturalist) is hosting an identification party on Zoom TONIGHT (Tuesday, May 3) at 6PM: Click here to join the Zoom at 6PM tonight!

ALSO: if you happen to come across a really cool observation (or if you made one yourself), please share it here in the comments section! We're always looking for interesting CNC observations to highlight in the results and to the press, so we'd love your help in curating those – it could be something rare, a new record, an interesting interaction, a great photo, or anything that makes you think it's an extraordinary observation!

Posted on May 3, 2022 03:42 PM by kestrel