I am more of a plant guy (i like the other stuff but am not as fast to find them) but i can definitely easily get 50-80 species of plant in an hour using the app (no photo processing needed, but maybe you don’t count that in the big day)… the main thing is that after 80 observations or so the battery is dying (even if it’s in an hour, 80-90 obs kills the iphone battery) and when you get well over 100 observations the app gets slow. You also have to log out then in again every now and then to clear the cache. I sometimes ‘cheat’ and use a work phone also, and also bring an external battery and charge the one phone while using the other… that ‘workflow’ i could easily get 200+ plant species if they are there to be found, or else make a close-to-full species inventory for several spots. It’s fun! Unfortunately I don’t usually have a full day to do just this, but sometimes I do :)
Yeah, I ran into battery issues too, I had to have a long lunch at home to let my phone and camera recharge!
in the past i experimented with a phone case with a battery built in, but it was kind of iffy. and it wouldn’t go along with my case with the macro lens
Something along the lines of a usb battery jumper (one about the size of a phone, but slightly thicker) along with a usb extension cable will allow phone use while charging on the go.
ooh, yeah i do have one like that, don’t usually bring it in the field but it’s nice
Wow that is really impressive, and a great idea. I live out in the desert, so I don’t think I could get as many in a day as you were able to. But it would still be a fun exercise to undertake.
As far as external power banks go I really like these ones. They are slim and I can easily hold both the battery and phone comfortably. They attach securely to your phone with magnets which can be slipped inside your phone case or stuck onto the phone. I get more than one recharge for my iPhone from them. I love them so much after trying the first I bought more, and have extras for android phones to give as gifts.
SCOSCHE External Battery Pack for Micro USB
SCOSCHE MagicMount Portable 4000mAh Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Apple Certified Lightning PowerBank
Power banks come in all shapes and sizes. If you are driving from one place to another a lot you can also get an adapter that fits into your cigarette lighter and will take your USB cable for charging while you are driving.
I’ve added a quick list of known days over 300 species (as an arbitrary number to keep things manageable) to the original post. Congrats to @gwark for his very impressive record. Any additional entries would be very interesting!
Good point about skipping species that would normally be pursued, but take too long to catch/photograph. That would be an advantage of not working alone, though—slower tasks like netting a stubborn dragonfly could be spread out among a group whose members then all photograph it after it’s caught, or they could be delegated to someone not trying for a record. Of course, this doesn’t help with tiny species that just take a long time to photograph well, since that would have to be done by the Big Day observer(s) him/her/themselves.
Sugaring trees would definitely be a good thing to try; night vision goggles, too—I never would have thought of the latter!
Rules for the count–I’d be inclined toward something like this: no captive/cultivated organisms; nothing that is gathered ahead of time, even if it wouldn’t be considered captive by iNat (including, say, water samples already collected; shells already gathered from the beach; or insects temporarily captured from the moth sheet before midnight strikes and the count begins . . . but not including insects that have come to a moth sheet early and stayed of their own volition).
All gathering techniques seem fair to me, including bird call recordings, netting, and even specimen-taking where legal (not something I do myself now unless the insect is already dead, but I don’t see why it ought to be against Big Day “rules”). Seems to me the idea would be to document as many wild species as possible of what an observer could find in a 24-hour period. Some people might prefer different rules, though. What guidelines did you set for yourselves, @reuvenm @cmcheatle @gwark @charlie ?
Also, I’d be in favor of allowing all ID work and iNat postings to be done later—only the photos themselves would need to come from the Big Day. That would leave more time for acquiring species.
I made a fairly relaxed attempt the other day and got 131. I could probably do better, but we had visitors that day as well. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?on=2019-07-27&place_id=any&subview=grid&user_id=alexis_orion
Fun post!
I don’t think it would be too hard to hit 1000+ species in most temperate regions with some planning. If it were me, I’d pre-scout several areas for plants and other things that stay put (e.g. fungi, lichens, insect galls/miners). You could start right at midnight with several moth sheets set up in various nearby areas and hit a whole bunch of your scouted plants/lichens etc. in the dark. If you’re using a GPS-enabled camera then you don’t need to worry about draining your phone battery using the app and you can do things much quicker too - save the data submission for subsequent days. If you don’t have a GPS-enabled camera you can use software like RoboGeo to use a tracklog to write locations to the exif data of the photos before uploading. I don’t see any reason you couldn’t be at 400-500 before sunrise even hits then you could rack up 150+ birds/herps/mammals through the day as you do more plants (don’t forget you can use audio recordings instead of photos for some of these). You’d have a second evening/night to then hit completely different habitats with your moth sheets and staked out nocturnal botanizing. Similar to good bird big days you’d probably want a dedicated driver/data recorder to keep you on pace and from duplicating too much effort.
Now that being said, it would take some effort for sure! I’ve tried a few iNaturalist big days myself but they’ve always been very limited in geographic scope and haven’t involved scouting (or nocturnal botanizing!). Two of them have been part of the Canada Day Biodiversity Challenge that Colin mentioned (and which your initial post was spurred by). Here are my best three:
244 - July 1 2017 (all from my yard ~ 3 acres) - https://inaturalist.ca/observations?on=2017-07-01&place_id=any&user_id=mikeburrell
185 - July 1 2019 (covered a total area of about 5 acres) - https://inaturalist.ca/observations?on=2019-07-01&place_id=any&user_id=mikeburrell
175 - September 7 2017 (small part of Algonquin Park) - https://inaturalist.ca/observations?on=2017-09-07&place_id=any&user_id=mikeburrell
I did not really think about guidelines when I did it, but as a practical matter I’m not interested in cultivated species, so everything I observed was wild or feral (though at various stages of naturalization in the case of some plants).
I counted midnight to midnight, though as a practical matter that really meant about 5:30am until about 11pm (on the bigger day).
I did allow myself to drive between locations, though I’ve also considered doing a human-powered, or even walking big day.
I didn’t require myself to get photos or audio of all the species (in particular birds, and at least one reasonably common plant I saw and decided I would photograph when I saw it again, but never noticed it again).
On the first day I was completely by myself. The second day I had my kids along with me for a good chunk of the day. I don’t remember for sure, but think they probably pointed out a few insects that I might not otherwise have noticed. Otherwise they were along for the ride.
So far my big days have been mostly a solo affair based on my ability to find/see and recognize different species. More generally I’ve considered doing a team up, and while that might be more fun in some ways, in other ways it’s not as satisfying to me.
In particular, I’ve long thought about my explorations in natural history and efforts to learn the diversity of my place as ‘getting to know the neighbors’. In doing the big days and reflecting on the effort (which I wouldn’t describe as fun, even though it’s compelling to me), I realized that a significant part of what appeals to me about doing them is they show me how well I’ve gotten to know the neighbors.
At least where I live, I don’t really feel like it’s possible to get into the 500+ species range without having a pretty good idea of what most things that I’m observing are (even if not always to species). Otherwise there will be a tendency to have difficulty picking out the different species from the ‘wall of green’ (in the case of plants - but there’s a similar issue with other groups), or unintentionally spending extra time photographing the same species multiple times because you don’t have a good way of being sure you already had it. (In my second big day, this happened to an extent with hermit crabs that I wasn’t sure about - other repeats were mostly just ones I forgot I had already done).
Perhaps in places with more diversity of habitats (with little overlap in species) and/or species in general, this would be less of an issue, and it would be possible to accumulate high species counts without really have too much of an idea of what the species are (except in the very broadest categories) at the time of observation, though that wouldn’t be very compelling to me personally.
I thought it might be a bit of a challenge as the day went on to remember what I had already observed and keep track of the easy to get species I still needed to get, but I was a little surprised that I didn’t have too much trouble with this on my intentional big days. In the future I might consider using a checklist, and if I did, would probably benefit from having a support person (probably more than one, trading off) help tend the checklist for me, but for my personal big day attempts (as opposed to a group one), I would want to do all the observations (though I would accept the occasional pointer to things along the way).
For what it’s worth, if I were part of a team/group big day, I think it would make sense to stay together and mostly try to all be in on an observation (though it doesn’t really make sense to me that they should all actually make duplicate observations), otherwise it’s starting to trend towards a bioblitz with a small number of participants.
I’m not sure I have the stamina for actively seeking stuff out before dawn, going all day and then still going on the next night lol.
General guidelines I would say:
- If in a group, you can count the species recorded by everyone, as long as you stayed together the whole time, and the vast majority of species were seen by everyone in the group even if everyone didn’t document them. Personally I would probably still try to document everything myself even if in a group.
- Verifiable observations (photo or audio) only, and needs to be a reasonable attempt to make sure everything is actually identifiable from the evidence provided.
- Can of course ID and upload observations later
- Only wild species
But of course you are free to do it however you want.
I do think there is some limit of not much more than 1000 as to what is humanly possible. On my big day, in the first 20 minutes I was out when literally everything I saw was new, I still only was making about 4-5 observations a minute. 1000 species would require maintaining an average of 1 new species about every 1 minute 25 seconds over the entire 24 hour period… that’s getting a bit ridiculous when you factor in travelling time, breaks, and the end of the day when you’ve already documented almost everything remotely common. Spending even 1 minute looking up the identification of something can be a serious issue. And you need to do that… a lot of grasses for example will never get positively identified from photos.
I don’t necessarily disagree about possible species count, but I do want to point out that in certain terrain types, a single photo can later be split into a number of observations of different species. I think of reef sites in which a single shot might capture multiple fish, corals, maybe even sponges, algae, or echinoderms. A good photo of a tide pool or bed of plants or certainly a moth sheet might net a number of species. If pressed for time, an observer could quickly spread out a whole pile of shells and take one or two high-res images, then later crop to a great number of smaller ones. I don’t prefer to do new obs this way, but I have done them so from many pics I took before finding iNat, and it would certainly be a possible mode for those attempting max species numbers.
Counterintuitively as well as taking self-disciple to document stuff you would normally ignore, it also takes disciple to ignore stuff you would normally document. For example, on Canada Day when I did it, I think I went to 4 different places. So for example, if I encountered a Blue Jay at the first place, on a ‘normal’ day if I found them at later places, where normally I would try to document them, on this day, it is more efficient to ignore the subsequent ones and bank the time to search for other things, as you get ‘no credit’ for the followup ones
So here’s another question–where in the world would be an ideal site for a Big Day? Somewhere with quick access to as many varied, species-rich habitats as possible?
That is a tough question. Obviously closer to the equator is better, but rainforest may not be ideal because a large portion of taxa are inaccessible due to being high in the canopy. The best place might be somewhere beside the ocean with a good coral reef & other aquatic habitats close to shore, that also has a mountain that is not too gradual or steep. Along the mountain would be rivers, lakes, wetlands, deserts, and forests of all kinds. Everything would be within a tight 20 km or less radius, that can be accessed quickly though driving, biking and/or boating.
But for the reef, you are basically describing Vancouver.
last saturday, I broke my record and got 152 verifiable species. I wasn’t actually trying to do a big day, so if I really tried I’m sure I could get more.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?on=2019-08-10&place_id=any&subview=grid&user_id=alexis_orion
Inspired in large part by this conversation, I got out early last month to do another big day attempt. It’s taken me a month to get through all the photos (and a handful of recordings) to get the observations posted, but they’re now up
Although the weather was nice and the low tide was well timed (not quite so early in the morning as prior attempts, but still very low), I decided to ‘take it easy’ relative to the effort I made on my prior big days. In part this was because I had family visiting, and I also was curious to get a sense of how much difference it might make to spend more time at low tide instead of trying to cover more ground getting species I knew in advance I could get (primarily plants). As a result I spent less time in the field than either of my 2018 big days (including a longer break for lunch with family - and had some delays moving between sites due to waiting for other family members). I also covered fewer miles, and spent more time closer to home (within easy walking distance).
Some thoughts I had during my big day while reflecting on some of the points raised in this discussion:
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).
Travelling between sites has rapidly rising opportunity cost. I say this from the perspective of living in a town with only 14 miles of road total. Even relatively short <3-6 mile drives have a significant time cost that needs to be considered. In my case, I think driving a few miles for a better low tide habitat is probably worth the time, but I’m beginning to suspect that other than that, I might be better off just walking (or possibly biking - especially if there was someone to shuttle my bike a couple of different times) through a mix of habitats that might not have quite as much easy diversity (though still have plenty, if I learn it), but are close together.
Despite spending a couple of hours less (~13 or 14 hours vs. 16.5+ hours) than my biggest day so far, I only had only about 40 fewer species. Part of the reason there wasn’t a larger gap in species count despite the difference in effort was the 40-50 more species I got during the morning low tide this time. It’s a habitat I’m not great with (in terms of really knowing the diversity of species that can be found), but I spent an extra couple of hours there, and it seems to have paid off. I suspect spending time learning the intertidal organisms would provide a significant boost to totals of future efforts.
Generally, I think the largest numbers will come through targeting sites with high diversity of things that don’t move (or if they do, don’t move very far or fast), and then making observations of the movers (mammals, birds, flying insects, and larger marine animals) as you happen to come across them. I did have UV lights out to attract moths at night at my house, and picked up a few species first thing in the morning, and last thing at night (plus I know places where exterior lights are left on at night, and moths end up on the walls), but those numbers are relatively small compared to the total - and I think knowing the local bryophytes and lichens better would easily allow me to get far more species than I could reasonably hope to catch and photograph of insects in a similar amount of time. Maybe it would be different in an area with more insect diversity.
It definitely helped to have multiple cameras. I used my phone quite a bit, but also an Olympus TG-5 (especially for the beach, the smaller things, and when the light started to fade in the evening - it has a flash). With the phone, I didn’t bother to put in names in the field except for those times I made non-verifiable observations. Having external batteries I could use to charge both phone and camera was critical (despite being charged at the beginning of the day, both would have run down without the extra charge). I also used a cigarette lighter usb adapter to charge when I did drive between sites.
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. Maybe this would be less true in regions with a lot more diversity than I find at the northern latitudes where I live, but I think even there it would be very difficult to really accumulate large numbers of species in a day unless you already have a really good idea about what you are looking for/at.
Comparing my lists, I see there are 30+ species that I could have easily gotten if I simply had remembered to look for them and/or make an observation (I know they occur and are relatively easy to find at locations I visited). With that in mind, a checklist seems like it could be helpful, though I have a suspicion trying to manage/track it during the day it might cost more time than it was worth. Perhaps if it was organized by habitat and/or species group within species, and really only focused mostly on common “don’t miss” species, it would be more likely to be effective.
Even more effective than a general checklist might be a set of site specific checklists, though that would take a fair bit of advanced planning (which is probably necessary to really push the limits as far as possible).
Between now and when the days grow long again, I’m thinking about focusing on families and genera of organisms that are common with a handful (or more) species that I’ve tended to mostly overlook (some lichen and bryophyte taxa, in particular), and maybe continue to work on my intertidal knowledge and awareness. I suspect that if I do that, 600-700 species is possible without a lot of advanced planning, but pushing beyond that will probably require a well thought out plan for sites to visit and target species at each site (as well as on the route between them).
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 |
For sure, nothing wrong with this. I personally want to keep track of verifiable numbers though.
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.
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.