I can pick out lichens, even ID a very few. What I channel your way is fungi-not-lichen which is where I get lost.
Not to worry about Cape Town, everyone is out observing. Some of us are already identifying, but we will push thru when the cutoff time for obs hits. But it is much more rewarding to send please split / combine / delete prompts during CNC. I get tada actual responses!!
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.
At least the one-man-show features a fantastic performer.
Exactly. But I bet that it is convenient for educators/organizers of the CNC to say that they have recruited thousands of students/people that have uploaded tens of thousands of observations… After all, who cares for the quality of these observations and for what these people could have learnt…
It’s a miracle!! At this moment, there are MORE identifiers than observers in my local City Nature Challenge project!
(It’s been a rainy few days and there’s a very active pool of identifiers around here.)
Well that’s a miracle indeed! I have never seen the identifier number above the observer number
Maybe not. One of my favorite stories about Earth Day is when we had to take students out to a park to look for flora and fauna to identify. My group had a rather barren patch assigned to us, so I encouraged my kids to look under some logs and rocks. One of my students looked under a log and put it back. I said, “Nothing there?” He replied, “Not really. There was just a worm, and it ran away from me.” I blinked. “The worm ran away from you? Let’s look where the worm ran.” We looked. It was a salamander. I had to point out that worms do not have legs. We had a few productive minutes of discussing salamanders, with which none of my suburban students were familiar. I still grin whenever I think of the worm.
About 16,600 observations in New Mexico for CNC weekend (Friday to Monday). Excluding the cultivated plants and what I’ve already reviewed, about 11,000 remain. This is the biggest chunk of unknowns (920 at the moment), mis-IDs, and unmarked garden plants for the year, so I will work through this for as long as it takes.
Cape Peninsula 7K yesterday, down to 6700 overnight - so that is making progress. Now our people move from observing to identifying.
Western Cape 10K yesterday, down to 9700 - needs more work (my second target)
Rest of Africa - very quiet! - only another 100 to look at - but I did skip a lot of daunting dicots. Poor internet so lots of double or even triple uploads to Life - casual - comment on.
It is kind of odd isn’t it, and I agree that it’s not really ‘playing the game’, on the other hand it’s apparently not ‘playing the system’ either. It seems like there’s just a real lack of knowledge about how it works and what it’s for. Currently there are nearly 2500 pages of NeedsID in La Paz, of which 1300 are ‘unknown’! Those are not helping them toward the top of the leaderboard… Mis-IDs can artificially inflate species count, but unknowns artificially deflate it. There’s no way I’m going to spend time scouring those unknowns when there are things already ID’d as hoverflies around the world that need finer ID, and I can’t be the only one - so those are more or less lost for the purposes of the CNC deadline at least.
The plant folk are obviously feeling the brunt of it - over 1000 pages. Fewer than 200 pages of animals - mostly insects - and the standard of ID seems at least a bit better for those than what some people are reporting in other taxa.
The amount of unknown plants was honestly starting to give me a headache - I think I’m going to end up focusing on getting through the (relatively small) pile for my local CNC since its very manageable, and once I’m through with that go back to helping with La Paz unknowns. Its exhausting and the organizers there really need to get on participants to actually participate.
I think I tend to view CNC with a competitive first (but not adversarial) - cooperative second sort of approach. First of all I am team me. I want to get as many obs as possible, and get them ID’d within reason - do better than last year etc. Then I move on to local team: help my city improve its performance with IDs, get us further up the UK list. Then I’m team ‘world hoverflies’. And then I might chip in to some more general ID’ing wherever in the world I fancy (Not really as strictly regimented as I suggest).
I kind of feel that part of the competitive edge to CNC is that places should be trying to curate their own observations to a degree - and then we help each other out because we’re all nice like that, but we don’t owe it to ‘other teams’. On the other hand there’s a bit of ‘policing’ that needs to be done so that other places are not getting an inflated species count from spurious IDs - but unknowns don’t create that problem. I’ll try to tackle unknowns in my own place, but I may not bother elsewhere with any urgency for the CNC, as they can be dealt with at leisure afterwards… Do what you feel is most valuable and that you can enjoy - you don’t need to get anyone else up the leaderboard.
Incidentally, thank you for being a fungus person! Your kind are very precious here.
Its definitely a good perspective to have - I want to help out the bigger areas but like, is that really the most valuable? I can put things at higher level ids all day for areas I’m unfamiliar with but for my local area I can get much finer, because that’s just what I’m familiar with.
regarding fungi, hah, you’re welcome. That said, I’m definitely not an expert and I’m still learning a ton, and a lot of times with fungus even the experts can only just throw their arms up because the pictures just aren’t enough and its never going to get past agaricomycetes people can barely manage to take pictures of the gill/pore surface, let along recording things like taste, odor, or chemical reactions. (at least when something needs a taste it can usually get down to family or genus)
But a single picture of the top of a vaguely brown-gray-tan mushroom isn’t going to be much help
Hell, I know I have some lazy pictures of mushrooms that I’ve uploading without all the pics that I should have, because I didn’t feel like getting off trail and to get up close shots
(That said, time to go through some fungi for overall CNC because, hey, seems fun)
May I mention a certain Russula?
I was literally thinking of Russula as I typed that. And Lactarius. And Cantharellus (in the eastern US)
EDIT: Or like Trichaptum biforme/abietinum, or Suillus granulatus/weaverae, since you need to know what type/species of tree they’re growing with. Or Pleurotus dryinus/levis because LOL you’re not getting that to species without a microscope
Well, since I like to keep my map diversified, I don’t mind doing lots of broader level IDs in a place where I don’t know many finer ones. I’ll do a bit of La Paz.
Just a few moments ago, I noted the number of what I call true Unknowns world-wide (so no Bacteria, Viruses, etc.), just before 9 AM Eastern Time (eastern US, that is), as the final upload and identification period for the City Nature Challenge is now over.
As I wrote in the post I’m replying to, there were 265,245 true unknowns world-wide at 7 PM Eastern Time on April 26th.
On May 2nd, at 7 PM Eastern Time (so, right after the four-day period of making observations for the CNC), there were 462,526 true Unknowns world-wide. (Eek!)
Just now, on May 8th at 9 AM Eastern Time, there were 430,041 true Unknowns world-wide.
That’s an increase of 164,796 true Unknowns in just over a week, most of which can be attributed to the CNC. That 164,796 figure is 8.9% of all 2023 CNC observations. For the sake of argument, let’s say about 8% of all 2023 CNC observations are still Unknown after all the CNC efforts are officially over.
Now, we obsessive identifiers will of course clean up those Unknowns sometime in the next year or two, but frankly, that’s an exhausting task. And how many of 1.8 million CNC observations are captive or cultivated (despite the global CNC organizers’ reminders to focus on wild organisms)? And let us not forget that, currently, 51.4% of all 2023 CNC observations are Needs ID.
I think the City Nature Challenge is a fantastic event and I certainly don’t want to discourage any of the participants or organizers or iNat staff from doing it again and again. I’d just like to figure out how the burden of these Unknowns and Needs ID observations can keep from being so heavy on the shoulders of the iNaturalist identifiers.
Actually, I’m somewhat bummed out by the low number of unknowns in my local CNC… I’ll spread out a bit to help with others.
Of those a huge 26,741 are from the La Paz CNC observers!
The Albuquerque CNC is sitting at 25% Casual, 50% NI, and 25% RG. I think we will end up close to 1/3 or 3/8 garden plants. I’m pretty used to scanning through the city limits for entire taxa and marking all the cultivated observations.
1.8 million is an incredible number. I’ve contributed about 3,500 IDs to the CNC so far and that’s a drop in the ocean! After I finish reviewing another 7,500 New Mexico observations from last weekend, I’ll go back to other groups like Penstemon. It’s “easy work,” but quite repetitive.