southern African Garden Biodiversity's Journal

Why are observations in my garden not included in my project?

It seems that you have lots of observations from your garden.
If you are not concerned about privacy or publicity, why not consider creating a garden project? And then joining the project:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/southern-african-garden-biodiversity

The aim is to get an idea of the animals and plants surviving and thriving in our gardens, and to see how these vary across the city.

Please note the because your garden is small, the location accuracy is crucial. Typically gardens are 10s-100m across, which means that your location accuracy will need to be about half the garden width, to count as being in the garden (iNat uses the area of the Location Accuracy to calculate in vs out, and a large value means the observation will be "out"-side your garden). Vague accuracies will not register in your garden. One way to try and counter this is to map your garden as a little bigger than it is, but this wont work if your neighbours are active on iNaturalist: in which case, your location accuracy will be crucial.

How to set up your garden project?

- you need to have more than 50 observations in total (not just from your garden).

1. Go to Google Earth and create a polygon, and put in the boundaries of your garden, and save it as a kml file.
2. On iNaturalist, go to More > Places and create a place for your garden: allow checklists and the parent place is your city (or municipality - use the official names).
   
3. On iNaturalist, go to community > projects > start a project > get started on a collections project, with your garden as the place. Please include planted/captive observations.

Have fun recording what is in your garden!