This is such a cool story and study that is near and dear to the hearts of a lot of iNat’rs. How many species are in your house? My fav part: When we showed photos of the house and described our survey methods to 157 professional ecologists - they, on average, guessed we’d find 200 species over t…

For anyone still following this thread and/or is still interested, the full paper is out now, fully open access, at the below link: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.4225 Worth saying that we did get our presented numbers wrong; the actual number was actually higher (1,16…

I think time is a huge factor with a project like this – the frequency of monitoring, the times of day, but also the duration of the monitoring period. I’m guessing that most users here who have species counts of well over 1000 for their property didn’t get this number in the first year that they s…

[image] spiphany: I suspect that for most projects like this, the species count is not so much a reflection of the relative biodiversity of a space as much as it is a reflection of the energy that the observer put into documenting it. This is exactly right! For me, I only observe when I feel…

That’s a nice article, thanks for sharing. The purpose and intended audience is of course rather different than the one that inspired this thread – it is more focused on demonstrating the ecological importance of urban gardens and encouraging other people to adopt more nature-friendly gardening prac…

Balcony gardens can be truly amazing. Years ago I read about one in the North of England. He used a dustbin lid as a planter … build it … and they will come.

Along that line there are airborne fungi (famously, sourdough bread) plus those carried by resident and visiting humans like candida, yeasts, Coccidioides (valley fever), etc. and those native to the numerous other animals and the animals they carry. Most of which have probably never been described. …

[image] jnstuart: I should spend more time on my roof Seriously! We used to go on the roof to wash the solar panels but because of the steepness of the roof we decided to pay someone else to do that. But I have never forgotten how different (and more cohesive) the yard looked from the roof! I…

[image] tisli: Not to mention that I have barely any idea what plants I am putting on my balcony, how to care for them and how all that affects the species that are attracted. Homegrown National Park ( HNPark.org ) has lists of native plants that grow well in containers in the various US bioreg…

Thank you, that’s informative. I am not in the US, but I bet others can use that information too. And there are Dutch equivalents, I am sure. The balcony for me is mostly a question of whether I want to spend energy on it, and in what way. Not all changes I made are so thoughtful, although some wer…

Thanks for sharing our Never Home Alone project! We are currently analyzing the data and will have some neat results to share soon.

No worries, l didn’t take it negatively, was just trying to explain our thinking. We have quite a few of the same fungal species as the Northern Hemisphere, mostly due to plants and wood being imported wholesale in the days before quarantine. Those are, as far as l am aware, still mostly specific to…

House of a thousand species

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House of a thousand species

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