My family and I keep a register of the biodiversity in our land, recording all animal, plants, fungi we find, we also make follow ups of the things we observe like nests or growth.
Today we reached 1000 observations and +400 species.
Any type of recomendation for us to make the project as useful as it can be for inat?
Nice! Most of your observations are just in 1 hectare!
I would love to see some kind of map with “density” of species. I have a similar situation, with almost 700 species on the property (although much bigger). Maybe identify global “diversity hotspots”? 400 species in 1 hectare is really impressive.
How can I see your project? Can you provide a link?
Observation fields can add a lot:
These can get passed to GLoBI - when it does, it appears on the observation under the DQA (here’s an example - this butterfly has the nectar plant annotated, and you can click through to GLoBI to see it in their database).
Oh, I am sorry Susanne, I didnt provide much information
My family and I work in our property reporting all that we see
You can search my location like this (sorry I dont know a better way)
go to search, put this location
Manaure, Cesar, Colombia
then on the map go where the orange square is in this map.
You can see there all of our observations. as nitsuga74 said, majority of our observations are inside 1 hectarea of land.
I am not so sure about the species number tho, because Im not a biologist, just a INAT fan.
Please watch our project and helps us make it useful for INAT!
WOW I would love to see your property, can you share me?
About the 400 species, I am not so sure about it, but is what the numbers say when I ask the map.
About the hospot: I googled searched trying to understand what it is, when you mean identify you mean you want to know my hostpot?
According to what I just googled searched, I am in this hotspot
Tropical Andes-Biodiversity Hotspot: Preserving the Ecological Jewel | LAC Geo
Tropical Andes Hotspot.
If you mean my climate, I am mostly tropical dry forest, because I am under the 1000 meters above sea level.
About the DENSITY.
I was actually trying to figure out a way to report species density, one way I thought is report an specie at least a month, that way the year/month chart can be reported on the inat species profile. Because I have noticed some species dont have reports in some parts of the year. Maybe some due to migration, but the others?
I had this idea after I stopped seing this moth specifically,
Observations · iNaturalist
I saw a few of them around my house in the trimester of the year, but I dont longer see them around. And I kind of wish now I had reported every single one of them, because I didnt… and now I dont longer see them.
If you have any other idea on how to make the density map share with me please.
WOW!
I love this idea, thanks.
but where do I find this fields???
@lauranaturaleza - What a cool project! Thank you for sharing.
Have you tried using the Annotations? I like adding flowers and fruits to plants. Then on the species page you can see a graph of the phenology through the year. You can also search for photos of plants that have flowers or fruit, which is helpful for identification.
If you want to go beyond basic annotations, you can use the custom Observation Fields. On the Observation page you can find the Observation Fields on the right under Annotations, Projects, People. Just start typing and then choose the Field you want. You can search for these fields too, but you have to use custom URLs.
For example, here are all of my insect photos where I added an Observation Field for Nectar / Pollen Delivering plant: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?user_id=conorflynn&verifiable=any&field:Nectar%20%2F%20Pollen%20delivering%20plant=
Felicidades! I also use iNaturalist to record biodiversity on my property.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/monitoring-gardens-and-spreading-the-message/26094
These are my statistics from New Mexico, USA:
And, here’s a project from Africa where people collect garden observations: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/southern-african-garden-biodiversity. This is one of many similar projects.
Just keep observing. Consider “mothing” for moths and other insects attracted to lights at night: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/light-setups-for-mothing/48231
400 species on a property even as small as that in Columbia is just the tip of the iceberg. You can probably find 4,000 or more with time and some knowledge (and maybe better camera or macro adapter for phone for the smaller arthropods).
If you find yourself getting more serious, invest in a better camera to get better photos of the smaller things. Keep learning about what photographic angles and features of the organisms are best for identification–to help increase the chance that you’re observations can be identified to species.
On web, they’re on the right sidebar of any observation:
You can search for the individual fields, and once you use them, they’ll appear again in the future.
What you can also do is “search for observations without this field”:
…which will then take you to Explore, where you can then narrow it down further in the filters (so, if I wanted to annotate, say, leaf miner hosts, I’d set “Your Observations” to true, taxa to “Insects”)… you can also then open Identify, where you can quickly go through all those observations without (there the Observation Fields menu here is under the “Annotations” tab). Very useful for adding them to many observations at a time!
a somewhat unrelated suggestion – have a party! you’ve accomplished something special.
Light traps are a good way to see lots of moths and other insects, but I wouldn’t use them if you want to know what is living on your hectare. Many of the insects a light trap attracts will have been drawn in from the surrounding area. The trap basically messes with flying moths’ navigation. So what ends up in the trap will be partly from your patch of habitat and partly not.
To reach that number in Colombia I’m guessing you’ve found a lot of birds, plants, insects, etc. Impressive!
I imagine in such a biodiverse country there are probably still hundreds of species to be found, but many may not be well studied enough for identification… have identifiers told you of any undescribed species that you’ve found?
In addition to moth lights, another avenue for more obscure species would be micro-organisms. If you have a microscope, there’s a whole other world of organisms to explore out there.
Laura, take a look at this link: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-make-a-project-for-a-specific-place/41066
If an insect can see the light from the adjacent property, then they are certainly at least flying around in the airspace above the property to be surveyed at one point or another. I think that’s getting a bit too particular.
A property also (generally) isn’t a hermetically sealed-off space – the borders are permeable, with organisms coming and going, and a certain percentage of the organisms seen on-site are likely passing through rather than permanent residents. I wouldn’t consider light traps to be inherently different than, say, a bird feeder, which I think most people would be more than willing to include in a property species count.
Attracting birds with feeders is on the slippery slope away from what occurs there naturally, but the birds have chosen to go there and are getting some resources from the property, so the site is forming part of their habitat. Moths in a light trap have just been lured away from what they would otherwise have done.
The bigger the property, the more useful the trap records. Moth traps are fine if you are wanting to know what is in your county (unless you live a few 100 metres from the county boundary). But you find people claiming their garden is good for moths because of what they trap there. More likely they catch a lot of moths because their moth trap can be seen from a long way away.
We’re drifting off topic, but I find this interesting. I live in a suburban area with streetlights, exterior lights on neighboring homes, and plenty of light pollution from the urban core. Is my 1 LED lamp in the driveway actually bringing in insects from afar?
It is hard to say. If it is competing with much other light pollution, yours may not be having much effect. Different bulbs give off different spectra and I think moths tend to be attracted to the ultra-violet end, and it also depends on the brightness. I’m sure there has been much research on the topic but I don’t know it.
There was a move last year to increase the value of UK biological records by making them more precise, and one of the suggestions was to persuade moth trappers to use much less powerful lights so that there was more chance that the catch had come from the immediate surroundings of the trap. I can’t remember who proposed it and I haven’t heard any more about it. I suspect asking moth trappers to adopt traps that catch less is not going to be an easy win.
