Start Up

I’ve been chewing on the idea of a project for a few months. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with iNat functionality:

• learning how to format content in journal posts
• beginning to build out samples of ideas that I may implement as part of this project
• building projects to see which settings and approach I liked best

Today, I think I have arrived at the Project Settings configuration. It feels like a good time to take stock.

Project Motivation

• Improving my own ability to identify plants
• Providing tools that can help other observers and identifiers
• Giving back to iNat

Key Project Settings and Why

• Geographic scope - Most of my observing has been done in Teton County, WY. When I started identifying unknowns, I started there. When I ran out of those, I moved on to Park County, Fremont County, and Sublette County. That was my original scope for the project. After developing that idea for a while, the idea of covering the entire Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem occurred to me. It first seemed over ambitious and scary. But the more I think about it, a project that just includes the Southern Yellowstone Ecosystem seems like a bit of a missed opportunity.
  

• Project type: I considered having a number of collection projects by quality category (Research Grade, Needs ID, Casual and Unknowns) and have them in an umbrella project. I actually built it out. I like that it would give easy access to data for the different stages of identification (the cool histogram, taxa list by data quality, the “stats” button for each of those, etc). I decided that it was an unnecessary complication to use an umbrella project. So I have two collection projects:
  -Flora of the Yellowstone Ecosystem: Research Grade and Needs ID Plant
  -Unknowns of the Yellowstone Ecosystem Needs ID, excludes any with community ID within a kingdom

State of the Project

• Members: 1
• Admins: 1
• Observations: 106,301
• Research Grade Observations: 43,071 (40.52%)
• Needs ID: 63,233 (59.48%)
• Unknowns (from companion project): 704
• Species 2,396
• Identifiers: 2,439
• Observers: 8351

I grabbed a download to snapshot some of the data, in case I want to track something else in the future. (Just found that email an attachment feature on the download (nice!)

Posted on October 12, 2022 03:45 AM by whitneybrook