Thanks for responding to my comment - this was not meant as a critique, but rather reflecting my personal experience (I am a neophyte when it comes to fungi).
I am not familiar with the situation in Australia, and I might be spoilt by having some experts at hand that help me IDing almost any of my plant pathogens, but I don’t have an equipment with large enough magnification as well. Nevertheless, many of my observations got confirmed just by their host specificity. But, again, Europe is certainly much better covered in that aspect, with quite some good (online) sources to use
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1,150 species in one yard in one year? I’ve found around 640 species in my house/yard and I’ve been inatting for a handful of years now! I might have to up my game next season!
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Maybe I should do that. Then I would have more bacteral observations than just the one Cyanobacteria.
If you have any legumes growing in a lawn, the root nodules can indicate the presence of specific symbiotic bacteria. Some legumes can have multiple options, but for others like clovers and Black Medic you can usually get to species. There’s a project here.
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For anyone understanding German, here is a brand new article of a local garden survey.
https://www.anl.bayern.de/publikationen/anliegen/doc/an46101zehm_et_al_2024_garten.pdf
The main author told me he became aware of iNat unfortunately only after the main work was done…
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For anyone that can help me: what is the best way to set up a “household/backyard biodiversity project”? Do I have to create a place on iNat to have it being automatically populated with my current observations? Any other solution?
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My place is so small that I use a traditional project and add each of the few observations manually. That might be a way for you too.
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Depends on your attitude to privacy? I use my suburb as a pinned location. Then add obs to my project.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/elephant-s-eye-on-false-bay
I agree manually adding to a traditional project would probably work best. I don’t use a project at all but instead I’m tagging those observations so I can search for my backyard tag if I want to get a list of all those observations. As far as I know, there is currently no way to create a project based on specific user/tag combinations.
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I agree that using a traditional project is best. It would also allow you to obscure the location of your home observations, if that’s something you want to do.
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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 started monitoring it.
My experience with my admittedly tiny space is that it takes time to figure out how to most effectively observe the species that are present. What spaces are popular for which organisms, when to look for them, etc. And, often, there is also the time it takes to learn how to photograph them in such a way that an ID is possible.
I spent less time on my balcony this year compared to last (not working at home as much), but my hymenopteran species count is slightly higher simply because I upgraded my photography equipment, got more skilled at photographing quickly moving flying insects, and in some cases because I had learned what specific features were needed for ID and focused on this when photographing.
It also took me a while to realize that it was OK to handle organisms for the purpose of IDing them. This wasn’t about fear (I’ve caught or handled them plenty of times when I need to remove someone who accidently ventured into my apartment), but more about a feeling that they are just going about their business and it isn’t my place to disturb them.
For other organisms, it simply didn’t initially occur to me to look for them, or to record them, because their existence wasn’t something I had previously given much thought to.
Techniques like light attraction (moth sheets) or beating vegetation to capture small arthropods will also affect what one finds. I don’t think any such survey can ever provide an exhaustive account of the animal life forms present – there are too many factors. More intensive examination of the space will yield a higher percentage of the actual biodiversity, but there will always be organisms that get missed, for any number of reasons.
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.
(I have a long way to go to reach 1000 species for my balcony: two years in, I’ve observed about a quarter of that – just over 250 wild organisms. But given that the space is less than 6 m2 I don’t think I’ve done too badly. I’ve barely done any nighttime observing, so I suspect there are still some significant untapped possibilities.)
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This is exactly right!
For me, I only observe when I feel like it. And when I feel like it varies a lot. And when I do observe, what I am doing differs a lot. Some days I sit on the balcony in the sun for hours waiting for a lifer to become visible. Other times I am actively inspecting plants for half an hour. Sometimes I do a quick five minute survey of the glass panes, outer walls, floor and the plants. Or I try to figure out if it is another Eristalis tenax or E. pertinax, or whether it is finally some other diptera!
And the seasonal differences are huge too! I haven’t been on my balcony longer than a minute for months now.
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. But that is all part of the fun learning curve of getting to understand this beautifully diversified natural world!
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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 practices. I liked the discussion assessing which types of plantings were found to provide the best habitat for the needs of different types of organisms.
(I also looked up one of the articles they mentioned in the introduction – a survey of the wildlife found on a 5th-floor Munich balcony. For obvious reasons, I was curious to compare this to my own findings in fairly similar conditions, albeit in a different part of Germany.)
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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.
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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.
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 have periodic fantasies of building a Victorian folly staircase to nowhere in my yard just to take in the view occasionally.
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Homegrown National Park (HNPark.org) has lists of native plants that grow well in containers in the various US bioregions. (And other plant lists, like trees, shrubs, etc.) It is well known that native plants draw many times more local insects, etc., so you might start there.
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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 were. It is a nice learning process!
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Thanks for sharing our Never Home Alone project! We are currently analyzing the data and will have some neat results to share soon.
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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 their NH hosts. The ones we mostly got seemed to be the most versatile of species that were either wood-rotters or lawngrass/mulch dwellers, but were overwhelmingly macro-fungi. If there were micro-fungi, we largely failed to detect them.
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