37,000 Missing Observations!
If you have ever searched for the number of verifiable herp records from Texas in the Inaturalist database you will see that there are over 112,000 observations. But only 75,000 of those are in the Herps of Texas Project.
Why?
Because many observers don't know how to get their herp observations into the HOT project. We would love to see those 37,000 missing records added. They are excluded because the observers checked a specific box when entering their data, most without thinking about it.
In order for observations to be included in HOT, you must allow the project curators to see your locality data, even if it is obscured or private. Your obscured / private locations are still obscured from all other users.
So maybe we could make a push to notify those observers about this so that at least some of that huge mass of data can be brought in. We could see a 50% increase in the data of this project with that simple fix. If you find an observation of Texas herps that isn't in the project, why not let them know?
I have a separate journal post you could link to if it would help.
https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/sandboa/19459-joining-the-herps-of-texas-project
Chris
Comments
Chris makes a very good point here. As we (Texas Nature Trackers Biologists) are preparing to do a new data pull in mid-January, getting access to these "missing" records is very important to the project. We invite you to review your Observations and make sure that you have clicked one of the two "Yes" boxes. Thanks!
You could turn it into a collection project.
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