Excellent. You can also add a comment under this project journal post… https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/33048-welcome-to-the-project-for-biodiversity-around-homes
…to request adding your home project to the umbrella project.
I have a simple white sheet light trap setup I occasionally use on my balcony (I live in a pretty urban area). I estimate I racked up 100+ species in such a way.
3 Likes
For the bird list at my house, I considered the airspace above my house and yard all the way to the ionosphere. If a high-flying bird went over that I could see from my house, it counted.
7 Likes
White sheet and uv lamp in my driveway this year attracted 545 species in my suburban neighborhood 
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_id=egordon88&verifiable=any&field:Moth%20Sheet=
@jnstuart same rules for me, hence vultures and nighthawks on my list
6 Likes
Honestly what also helped was getting a camera setup with macro capabilities. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to image things like https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/174801234 with decent clarity easily.
If the plant diversity was better around my house then I predict the count would be even higher.
2 Likes
That’s really impressive, although it appears those numbers might be inflated a bit. I see several outdoor observations from that project located in urban parks etc.
I finally accessed the paywalled article. Here’s where they mention iNat, although YMMV on their statement “observations rarely come from consistent daily observations”:
While the rise in popularity of citizen science data-gathering platforms such as eBird and iNaturalist have provided considerable amounts of valuable biodiversity data (Tng et al., 2021; DiBattista et al., 2021), these data paired with traditional peer-reviewed studies are insufficient for answering how many species are typically on an urban property. This is because (1) there is considerable taxonomic bias and under sampling in both citizen science and traditional biodiversity data sets (Di Cecco et al 2021, Binley and Bennett 2023) and (2) even if the data were unbiased, observations rarely come from consistent daily observations, from a single urban property, over a continuous, and extended period-of-time… Identifications, where possible, were carried out using dichotomous keys and field guides, and through photographs uploaded to iNaturalist, Facebook naturalist groups, or sent to experts… We thank… iNaturalist users cesdamess and mmmr91, who were instrumental in providing significant identifications.
1 Like
Is there a tutorial for adding such a project?
here’s a tutorial for how to make a project for a specific place https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-make-a-project-for-a-specific-place/41066
…and after you’ve done that, then the second step is
3 Likes
Thanks very much!
1 Like
I’ve documented 2040 species in my suburban southern Ontario backyard. I have gotten rid of the lawn, naturalized it with native plants, and started a backyard project. The garden measures 50’ x 100’, or approximately 0.1 acres. It’s surprising how many species can survive and thrive in an average suburban backyard, given a bit of habitat. Here’s my project.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/backyard-biodiversity-amherstburg-on
12 Likes
Hi fellow inat users! I am one of the authors of the study along with @rqy-yong, below I try to answer some of your questions about the paper/news article.
@SQFP … If someone has access to the paper (I don’t): I’m curious about whether they count the tenant in ‘Mammalia’. And the tenant’s nasty diseases in e.g. ‘Fungi’, too.
We had a trespasser so humans counted, but we weren’t intending to count humans. For the same reason, we counted dogs and cats.
@annkatrinrose … they mention the full species list being available in supplemental data. However, I can’t find that list
The full list is available on github at (see the file house_records_RY, note you need to run the code to get tallies, or at least look carefully at the dates).
https://github.com/matthewhholden/HomeBiodiversitySurvey
We have an iNat project for this paper (note many species that are hard to photograph did not make it on iNat)
https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/projects/40-tamar-st-microblitz
Finally, the article is open access (we paid $ for it with an institutional agreement) but is for some reason paywalled before final proofing, which at academic pace maybe 2024. The academic journal thing is such an annoying scam.
@jasonhernandez74 … Including the yard inflates the number. I wonder how many species it would be if only the interior of the house was included?
That’s a good question. If I had to put a number on it, I’d go close to 50:50. Most of the moths were first detected inside so that gets you 350+ species inside right there (no aircon, windows open, and visibility is so much better inside). All 6 species of cockroach, 13 mosquitos, most of the fruit flies and house flies, lacewings, etc. Since the windows were often open the inside v outside is actually not so easy to define.
@whaichi … Article title: in your house. Article contents: on our property
Fair enough, we took some liberties with the title, which is a play on words (house of a thousand corpses) but we do explain that we included the yard in the paper as you mention
@carnifex … They apparently did not bother to check for plant pathogens - they should’ve found dozens of (true and false) mildew and rust fungus species on both wild and ornamental plants. Plus all the other microfungi growing on living plant matter
Our rules were that each species had to be identifiable as an organism with the naked eye, so nothing microbial would count. We perhaps didn’t seek out plant pathogens that may just look like markings on a plant, perhaps due to expertise, but also perhaps due to some markings not definitively being identifiable as definitely an organism, at least to us. Remember our rules are that the literal organism had to be identifiable as an organism. A marking on a plant caused by a microbial organism would not meet that definition. It is important to note that the vast majority of plants were weeds and doing extremely well. That all said, you are probably right that we underestimated the pathogens. We grew no ornamental plants, but did have some food plants some of which counted but some did not, depending on whether they satisfied our definition.
@jnstuart … For the bird list at my house, I considered the airspace above my house and yard all the way to the ionosphere. If a high-flying bird went over that I could see from my house, it counted.
We did something similar to that but had a hard time distinguishing whether it was within the verticle bounds or not, so decided to go with identifiable from the property as that was easier to determine. That rule is mostly only key for the birds since any insect identifiable from the property is basically on the property.
@robotpie Honestly what also helped was getting a camera setup with macro capabilities.
I had a cheap macro-clip for my iphone, and we also had a low-power dissecting microscope. A mix of records are photos in the field vs under the microscope. But no dissections were allowed. All were released alive. We did use the fridge to help cool things down if they were moving too much to get a good photo.
19 Likes
Bravo!
Yeah, for birds, I do the same. If I’m on my roof doing some repair and I happen to see a Swainson’s Hawk or Turkey Vulture flying in the distance, it becomes a “yard bird.” I should spend more time on my roof, the birding opportunities are often good from that vantage point. I also count high-flying Sandhill Cranes during spring migration as I often can hear (if not see) them from my yard.
3 Likes
Further to Matt’s comment, we had frequent debates about whether we should count human, dog and cat, and we settled on doing so because we decided that one of our primary criteria was whether or not something was ecologically “participative”, that is, they substantially added or took away from the biomass of the property and/or contributed to some sort of ecological process, e.g. pollination, decomposition etc. We obviously counted, as we generated compost/waste, maintained plants (watering and some pruning and mowing to keep the real estate agents happy) etc. Dogs and cats did too as they pooped in the yard, caught the odd rat/mouse and tracked weed seeds in on their fur. That criterion, conversely, excluded things like the house plants and aquariums on our kitchen counter, which were wholly confined, didn’t feed or feed on anything, were not self-propagated and did not represent a self-perpetuating population.
Re: fungi, we didn’t have the best drainage (our soil was mostly loose clots of clay that drained rapidly after rain and we did little to nothing to artificially enrich it) so maybe our yard wasn’t optimal for fungi. All things said I was slightly surprised by how high the number was, but then we had no real frame of reference. We logged every recognisable morphospecies, but that could well under-represent things that’re species complexes or required proper microscopy or DNA, which we obviously couldn’t do.
Honestly, if I had been better prepared, I would’ve brought the stains, 100x lens and oil, and some slides and coverslips home, and we might’ve been able to do micro-organismal diversity too. As it was, we were given a day to evacuate work and start locking down (remember this was end March 2020), and what I could grab on short notice was what we had. I was happy to try and push some boundaries, e.g. the Aspergillus molds that infested our onions and some others that appeared on some left-out dishes were counted, at least to genus, because they were recognisable to that level by growth form. I could’ve even snuck in a cheeky Serratia marcescens as that is 99% of the time the bacteria that forms scums around unscrubbed showers and sinks. But we had to draw the line somewhere and we settled on things we could ID with some decent magnification. Ultimately, I would’ve been unsurprised if most things, esp micro-moths, beetles etc, just ended up as sp. 1, 2, 3… on the list, and it was our immense good fortune to have come across so many helpful experts on iNat and FB who could take lots of those things further.
14 Likes
OK… what about nasty fungal diseases? Let’s break boundaries, it’s all for science! 
1 Like
Yes, Invite some friends to the house who have various infections you can count as being “in the house.” Got a case of Giardiasis? Come on over.
6 Likes
this one is pretty impressive https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/my-yard-survey-west-virginia-usa
1 Like
I’m happy/sad (delete where appropriate) to say no one had any at the time and, alas, I wasn’t equipped to assess everyone’s respective microbiota!
3 Likes
It’s not that we didn’t “bother”, it’s that we largely couldn’t. ID-ing of any of those things with any degree of certainty would’ve required, at the bare minimum, a compound scope with 100x magnification, assorted stains and slide preps, and ideally ability to make cultures and sequence DNA. As a researching taxonomist I theoretically had access to all those things, but 1) we were directed to evacuate work and lock down at home with very little notice; 2) there were misgivings about starting up a whole lab at home, not to mention OHS restrictions; and 3) we actually didn’t think to undertake this project until after lockdown had commenced (on day 1, after we were already stuck at home). It’s also worth noting that stuff like that blows out very easily. Microbiomes are incredibly complex, with lots of species/taxon complexes, strains and symbioses.
Now we did actually try; some molds do appear on our list to genus level (mostly ones that appeared on old left-out food and veg), and things like Coelosporium plumeriae, which is pretty obvious on frangipani leaves, were also added. I am in no doubt that, if we had the expertise, time and ability, we could’ve swelled our numbers on the microbiota. But there are lines to draw and we drew them. We don’t regret that or not holding ourselves to any higher standard than can feasibly be held against anyone else doing a project like this.
8 Likes
Many of the people who were named in the acknowledgments were actually iNat users as well; the two at the end were the only ones for whom I couldn’t trace their real names. At the same time, this is one of the pitfalls of reading pre-proofs. We’re right now editing for the actual proof and have added in lines that more explicitly acknowledge ALL users of iNat and the FB groups we used, not just the ones we namechecked for having helped us most.
3 Likes