I have been asked to set up a project for The Queensland Naturalists’ Club (QNC) but need some advice on the best way to structure it. First a bit of background.
The QNC is one of the oldest scientific/naturalist clubs in Queensland, Australia, founded in 1906. Throughout the year, we have one field excursion a month (day, weekend or long weekend) and usually one longer excursion, lasting a week or more, to more remote locations (western desert national parks or barrier reef islands).
I have been contributing observations from many of these trips to iNat for years but would like to set up a project to encourage more members to see the benefits of entering their observations on iNat and to let them go back and later see what was recorded and identified from a particular outing.
I am thinking that the structure might be to have an umbrella project - “The Queensland Naturalists’ Club outings”, with collection projects for each outing under that e.g. QNC 2021 July: Wellington Point; QNC 2021 Aug: Bribie Island, etc
Is this the best way to go about setting up this project? Are there any better structures? Are there any similar projects (I’ve been looking at the example of the “City Nature Challenge 2018” for ideas)?
I think that we would have to let people populate the project by members manually entering their observations from a particular outing because it is not confined to one taxon (we look at animals, plants, fungi) nor to a particular area (its mostly in Queensland but occasionally further afield) and we would like to restrict this to only observations from the QNC outings.
I’d welcome any ideas or suggestions.
The way you need to set it up to cover everything you need:
Each small project is a collection project
Use one of the user filters. You’ve got two options:
a) If you think everyone involved will remember to join the project, then go for the ‘project members only’ tickbox.
b) However, if you think some people may forget/not respond to requests to join, and you have a list of every username of the people involved, you can manually add each of them using the ‘include users’ filter.
3.Use the ‘date observed’ filter as well, and set it to the date range of each trip. Only fill out the dates, don’t worry about the times. If the trip is one of the single day ones, check the ‘exact’ tickbox and fill in the date there.
So if you set up each individual project like this, they’ll collect all observations across all taxa and at any place, but only from the users you specified, and on the dates you specified.
You can also set these up to collect observations retrospectively from previous outings if you want.
