Dear iNaturalist colleagues,
I am reaching out to you trying to find some guidance on the best way to do a project I have in mind. The idea is a project where people can follow the phenology of solitary bee colonies.
This colonies are made normaly of approx 20-100 nests, occupying an area of 1-2 square meters most of the times in the ground or mud slopes. The majority of the activity occurs in a matter of weeks, and the rest of the year, the place becomes silent. I want to make a project where people can point where this colonies are, with a photo of the colony and an estimate of nests. And then, at this colony, to be able to record sightings of:
-The bees species that nest in the colony.
-The parasites present (You would be surprised by the number of species of parasites that can appear)
-The moment of the year when the nest is active.
Most of the time you just find a colony, with the holes in the mud wall, but have no idea of which bee nests there, and it would be very helpfull to have the collective effort of one person telling where the colony is, another couple of persons telling when there is and when there is activity, and so on. If possible, it would be amazing to send “callenges”, to observers in the area to say: Can you check on this colony in March and April and see if there is any activity?.
So, my question is: Is there any way of building a project where people create “colonies” as an observation, and then people can complete the missing information in that colony? So far, the only option I saw is making in iNaturalist new public places on the map, one for each colony, and then add that place to the project, but I wanted to have the colony as an “umbrella” or “house” where the other observations are collected. Also, it is unlikely that people open a new place in the map of iNaturalist, as they are normally bringing observations, not new places. The colony, I want it to be an observation by itself.
I put one of this colonies that I know of, as an example. In this case, a colony of Anthophora bees.
Hi Thomas,
thanks for the response!. How can I make an observation of the colony if I do not know the bee specie? I am interested in summing the observations around a colony, so I can see the phenology of that very specific square meter of land. I have not find how to do that in a traditional project.
I follow this projects you recommend, but I have not seen something like the “colony” perspective.
I suppose you would put as specific of an ID as you can (maybe just “bees”). If you want to group different species/individuals in the same colony, you could make a project for each colony under an umbrella project. But that would probably get tedious. It would likely be better to make some sort of labelling system with observation fields to identify the different colonies.
If you don’t know the bee species, you can identify it as “Anthophila” or another higher-order taxon. You don’t have to know the genus or species.
In a traditional project, you can search through the observations on iNaturalist and manually add observations to the project, if your project is for very specific cases like this.
Just some food for thought: I’ve approached similar situations like this, where I’m wanting to study a very specific natural phenomenon, and there’s a project that studies a broader version of the same phenomenon, I will work within the larger project and use observation fields to track the information the project doesn’t support. Otherwise, what happens is you create a tiny project that no one other than you ever sees. When you join the larger effort, your contributions are more likely to make a difference in the iNaturalist community.
Thanks a lot for the advice given. I will consider incorporating it to a bigger project like “Ground nesting bees”. But I am still after a method for involving the community/nearby observers, to go to the colony and take a look to see if it is active or not. This is why I was thinking o making a project for colonies, as I was thinking on creating a “Colony guardian” or “Colony guards”, that take an special look on the colony every now and then. Mainly for the phenology changes in the community, to be able to see if it gets activated earlier because of climate change, the population increases or declines, etc.
You can write a journal post - and link to it in a comment to invite others to join you at that particular bee colony.
On your own obs you can link to your journal post in the Notes up top.
@jasonhernandez74@natev@DianaStuder@thomaseverest
Thanks a lot for your help and advice. I have been working on it and I think I found a way of doing it.
I build a project for each colony (Just 3 for now for testing): https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/solitary-bee-colony-1 https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/solitary-bee-colony-2 https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/solitary-bee-colony-3
Then put all of them under an umbrella project. https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/solitary-bee-colonies-umbrella
I built the projects in the “new-traditional” way. Not as a collection project. I do not understand why, but Collection projects give much less freedom, and you can not make the project in a specific location, you must chose an area already existing in the map. This is so frustrating, as you can not make a project on a specific land plot of your choice.
I added in the Project journal a table of the sightings, so it is visible which months need checking. I am sure there should be a way of making this easier, of more clear. For example, the table does not appear fully in the welcome page of the project.
Let me know how do you see it. I am still not convinced 100%.
It is difficult to see the phenology of the nesting colony, and I need to build a project for each colony, which is tedious. Also, I can not duplicate the project If I build it in the “new-traditional” way, so it is a bit frustrating, knowing that if it is a “collection” project, I can just duplicate the project for each colony, but once again, I do not hace a location to add, as I do not want to collect all the observations of the municipality.
Any advice would be very welcome.
Thanks a lot
It sounds to me like what you’re doing would be best done by using observation fields to organize observations, exporting them as a CSV file, and using a combination of free visualization tools to create a dashboard that lets you visualize the phenology. I did something similar with pollinator-plant interactions. (You can see some of my work in my iNaturalist user bio.)
Hi Nate, thanks for the suggestion. My problem with the collection projects is that it needs to exist withing the boundaries of an already existing place (county, village etc). And if not there, you need to include the place in the general map.
iNat says not to add too many places tot he map as it slows down the site, and also, it is a very tedious process, and it will appear for everyone publicly, and that would saturate the map for people not interested in this.
I will, though, improve the observation fields I can ask for, so I can organize things better.
All the best.