Hello Herps of Texas curators! We're planning on doing another data download in early March for inclusion in the TX Natural Diversity Database, so we're asking for an extra push in the next month and a half to get observations curated.

The top priority observations for curation (roughly 1,700) can be found here:
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/project/herps-of-texas?projects%5B%5D=411&list_id=211277&pcid=no

Our last data download (Feb 2017-May 2018) netted over 1,600 curated observations of tracked species that met criteria for inclusion in the TXNDD - thank you for sharing your time and expertise to make that possible!
-Tania

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