iNaturalist Big Days

[reuvenm]

Very nice! Seems I can’t edit the original post anymore unfortunately. Here’s the updated table. Hopefully we can get another name in here soon!

Observer	Date	Verifiable Species (as iNat counts them)
@gwark	13-Jul-18	492
@gwark	3-Aug-19	457
@gwark	15-Jun-18	404
@reuvenm	13-Jul-19	386

@gwark

For me personally, it seems fine to have a few non-verifiable observations, as long as it’s a small percentage (maybe less than 5% is a good target?). There were several birds a, couple of fish, and one insect that I saw (or heard) quite well to identify, but wasn’t able to easily photograph. In this case, that was 11 species (out of over 450 total).

For sure, nothing wrong with this. I personally want to keep track of verifiable numbers though.

@gwark

I remain convinced that the vast majority of observations in a big day will need to be of things that are recognized by the observer in the field.

100%. You can’t be wasting your time taking photos of multiple specimens of the same species, or taking photos of species that don’t show the features necessary for ID. There’s certainly leeway there - for example I know what photos are generally necessary for moth ID, and individual species are often easily separable, even if I will have to look up all the species later.

@gwark

Travelling between sites has rapidly rising opportunity cost.

Yup. This isn’t like birding where you can find most of the species at a site in a few minutes to a few hours. I have a tentative route roughly planned out for next year that will involve only about 30 minutes total in the car, and a fair bit of cycling. And that’s to cover two different areas that have almost completely different species due to different geology.

I’m not at saltwater which definitely gives a very different dynamic. I’m not convinced the effort required for sampling underwater organisms in freshwater justifies anything more than a very short time spent. But may give it a shot.