I am developing an outreach program that will encourage people to make observations, sorta like the City Nature Challenge but with targeted taxa. One of the calls to action will be for participants to join the umbrella project for on-going communications and celebration.
I know that the project badge ends up on project-qualifying observations made by members. And I know that members receive notifications about any journal posts.
What other benefits are there to being a member of a project? Am I missing anything?
Are you sure you need an umbrella project? An umbrella project is a project containing other projects. If you’re just targeting certain taxa… wouldn’t a regular collection project work?
I do. The project focuses on aquatic macroinvertebrates which have organisms in both nymph and larval stages. As things stand now, you can’t have both nymph and larva filters activated in the same project.
For example, the ever popular caddisfly is found in an aquatic setting as a larva while the rockstar dragonfly is a nymph. They cannot appear in the same collection project at larvae stage, hence the need for multiple collection projects which will be curated into an umbrella project. At the risk of shameless self promotion, this is the beta version of the umbrella project so you can see what I’m referring to.
I’d say one advantage is that you can search across all projects within the project easily by keying the umbrella name in on the Explore / Filters pop-up. At least I don’t think there’s a way to search across multiple projects without an umbrella. Some of the github scripts also allow you to pass in the umbrella project name. And… communication… assuming you can get all the members of the child projects to also join the umbrella.
The “stats” page for umbrella projects can become pretty interesting too. It becomes kinda like a collective blog, listing the observations with the most engagement across all child projects.
If the project has journal posts - for me that is THE benefit. Puttering thru the moving stats as time goes by is also interesting (and addictive, I’ll just check where we are at now …
That is an awesome capability! For my umbrella project on Great Smoky Mountains National Park trails, I can search for a species across all the trails at once. (Can’t do it from within the umbrella project, has to be done as you describe through Explore.) Thanks, @stockslager!