In INaturalist, as in gardening, there are no failures, only experiments. But the Norman Woods Bio Blitz acme pretty close to failure territory. It was probably all my fault.
But in case INaturalist wants to make it easier for incompetent amateurs like me to organize Bio Blitzes, here are the things that went wrong.
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It was too complicated for me to limit the geographical extent of the project. A group of neighborhood kids and parents wanted to explore an oddly dense forest in the middle of our town, and we couldn’t make the geographical limit smaller than the whole town. It would be great if, on the “New Project” page, you could click on the map, and then draw the limit around the area you want to explore.
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A couple people with android phones could not find an “observe” button in the app. I couldn’t help because I only know the Iphone app.
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Once we started making observations, they did not appear in the project. I thought all observations made within the geographical, time, and taxon limits of the search would be automatically added. No such luck. Even my observations weren’t added, and I created the project. Do people have to be invited to the project by username?
Anyway, we had fun catching bugs and searching around in the woods, but it didn’t produce much in the way of useable/interesting/fun data about an urban forest we are interested in.
There is another forested patch of city we’re going to explore sometime soon and I’d love to know how to work these kinks out.
Many thanks!
RF