'Tis the Season to be IDing :)
Hello all,
I had a conversation with Roger Morris on the Facebook group this week that gave me a few thoughts, and resulted in me finding some new ways of getting data which I thought you might be interested in. Here is a graph of the number of identifications added to UK Hoverflies weekly in 2022 and 2023. The green dot represents the last datapoint before we really kicked things off on this project.
It looks like identifications followed a very similar trajectory to the previous year until around the start of the project and then took off. That's really exciting to see. Another thing I find interesting is that the number of identifications is generally remarkably low in the winter, which kind of challenges my own perception that people on iNat generally do more observing in the summer and focus on identifying in the winter. It seems in fact that both rise and fall together. Perhaps we can use this winter differently, and use it as an opportunity to learn more about our favorite creatures, and practice identifying them.
Now, one thing Roger pointed out was that at some point early in the new year he and Stuart will download iRecord's dataset for 2023. I thought it would be good to see if we can get more of 2023's iNat data through to them in December so that it appears in that download. So may I suggest that up until Christmas, when you are identifying UK hoverflies, it would be a good idea to stick to 2023 records. (We can work on older records in the New Year). To that end, here is a slightly different take on the NeedsID pile with a focus on 2023.
Firstly let's put 2023 in the context of previous years:
As you can see, nearly 40% of the pile is from 2023. But this doesn't tell a complete story, because something quite remarkable has happened this year: after 3 years of relative stability, the total number of hoverfly observations this year has jumped by 50%!
Incredibly, we've done so well at identification that there are more RG observations this year, than total observations in any previous year! But still nearly 6000 from 2023 Need ID. Here's how they divide up in detail:
We don't need to break down the Bacchines, Melanostomines, or Microdontines because they are are almost entirely Platycheirus, Melanostoma and Microdon respectively. And I won't break down the small number of Pipizines either because there are so few. Here's the rest:
I'm not expecting us to get everything done by New Year, but let's see what we can do in these long cold evenings. It would be lovely to send through a good diversity of species to give HRS a rounded picture of iNat observations, so perhaps you might like to pick out some of the slightly smaller genera to learn and to identify, rather than having us all just hammering away at Syrphus and Eupeodes! There are also those observations stuck at higher levels if you don't want to be the person making things research grade :)
Please don't forget to try to add annotations before IDs, so that HRS get all of that data :) I usually do all the annotations for a page, and then go back through the same page and do what IDs I can.
Here are some URLs:
2023 UK Hoverflies Needing ID
2023 UK Hoverflies stuck at levels above genus
2023 UK Hoverflies Needing ID and without sex annotation excluding difficult groups and without 'Copulating' observation field
2023 UK Hoverflies Needing ID and without sex annotation with ONLY THE DIFFICULT GROUPS and without 'Copulating' observation field
2023 UK Hoverflies Needing ID and without life stage annotation <= NOTE this has now already been completed! Well done!
Please remember, if you want to go on to annotating old Research Grade records either use the links that were provided during the Annotatathon, or just add &geoprivacy=open&acc_below=500 to the end of your URL.
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