City Nature Challenge 2018-- Day 4

Yesterday was the last day of the City Nature Challenge, at least for observations; species identification will continue for a few more days before a winner is declared. I didn't have a good day observing yesterday. Both quality and quantity of my observations were lacking. My strategy of choosing less-frequented parks (as I did on day 1) backfired spectacularly on me. First of all, I knew that day 4 would be a tough one: trying to log species that I had not logged in the previous 3 days would be much harder given the number of observations I'd made already. And the park I went to turned out to have mostly the same species I saw elsewhere, and in general less diversity than the other parks (even the new one I went to the grand opening of Saturday). Disappointingly, it seemed to be dominated by non-natives and invasives. Also, it was overrun with poison ivy, which meant that in some places I literally could not put one foot off the path because the poison ivy ran right up to the path. Because it was also growing all over trees and vegetation it meant that I couldn't lean out to get a photo either. I heard a lot of birds, but saw none and don't yet know how one gets audio uploaded to iNat (having already failed on Saturday after repeated attempts to upload video of fish that I was having trouble getting a decent still photo of). I got only 27 observations, many low quality: poor photos, poor specimens, few species identification. It was a frustrating and disappointing experience. In contrast, getting only 27 photos on Saturday at the new park I considered a success because the quality of the observations was much higher and the park was so beautiful.

I've been thinking as I went along about how things could be better for the City Nature Challenge in the future, not just for me, but for everyone. There were a couple of random "iNat training" sessions locally, though given how big the area is, they were only within easy reach of a small fraction of the potential participants---and one training session was scheduled near the end of the challenge, so afterwards people had just one day to put that knowledge to use. I downloaded the app 2 weeks before the challenge and used it quite a bit before then so I would be familiar with it prior to the challenge. I'm not sure why training sessions are needed; it's not difficult. I could explain how to use the iNat app and its features in about 5 minutes---and I didn't need anyone to explain it to me. I read the starter guide online, well, skimmed it really, because it's so easy to use. It seems to me that iNat training isn't what the City Nature Challenge really needs to be more successful; what it really needs is more naturalist training. I usually take multiple photographs for observations; a closeup (or as close as I can get), anything that might be distinguishing features such as leaves, and also growth habit. Nevertheless I sometimes found myself thinking that I needed a better understanding of what information a photo needed to capture to distinguish one species from another. For all the plants I took multiple photos of I don't actually know if I captured what was needed for a species ID. Probably, yes, in most cases of plants, especially given how many pics I took, but not always yes in the case of plants (and trees in particular) that to the untrained eye look very much alike. And let's face it; if iNat and City Nature are recruiting widely, looking for new users to participate, then they are mostly looking at recruiting "the untrained eye". This is brought home to me whenever I go into iNat and go through observations which need ID. (1) There are a lot of people who have absolutely no idea what the most common and ubiquitous plants are. (2) Huge numbers of users take only a single photo, a closeup of a bloom (very artistic!) but utterly impossible to ID down to species level without leaves or growth habit for a lot of plants. Or they take a single blurry low-res photo of a single bloom on a plant (one of a variety of shrubs, flowers, and herbaceous foliage) from a sidewalk 10 feet away. The point is: using iNaturalist without any training is a lot easier than taking photos from which species can be ID'd. If we want lots of taxa ID'd to species level, then we need to be training what to look for to ID taxa and what to photograph, and how to photograph. Mind you, I've got my share of horrible single photos for observations, but there's usually a physical reason that meant it was impossibleto get a better photo with my phone's camera. I upload the very best photos I can take at a given moment and a given place, with a phone camera. But there are some that I fear aren't enough to ID simply because I didn't know what precisely I needed to photograph to distinguish exactly what species something was. It's great to have people running around the city looking at nature, but for their observations to have any value to scientists and researchers, they need to be taught how to look at nature so that they can know, and others can know, what they are seeing.

Everyone has to start somewhere. I think the City Nature Challenge is a good start for the average person who doesn't have my naturalist inclinations and curiosity. But it is just a start; I hope that people who began with City Nature will continue to observe and get better at it, as I also hope to do.

This bioblitz was overall a good experience for me: I explored and identified a lot of species. (I hope to get more of my observations ID'd or confirmed in the coming days.) I finished out of the top 20 for observations (oddly even though the challenge is over my ranking has dropped 2 places since I started writing this post), with 149 total observations in four days; it remains to be seen where I'll end up in the final species count, but right now about half my observations don't have species confirmed, which, honestly, is something that concerns me more from a personal standpoint of simply wanting my observations ID'd or confirmed for my own personal expansion of knowledge than from the perspective of wanting some "good" number of the City Nature Challenge. I want my species ID'd because I want to know. (I have attached my Day 4 observations to this post, disappointing as they are....)

הועלה ב-מאי 1, 2018 04:53 אחה"צ על ידי gulfcoasttoad