Wrap Up & Personal Reflections

A working draft

Our inaugural work bioblitz was last Friday. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I'm delighted. We were able to identify 100 species, including some very coverted taxa, incuding the Northern Koura and the velvetworm.

Most people needed to be introduced to the iNaturalist application.

Prep

TODO

Overcoming fear of the unknown

There was fear and uncertainty about participating from two directions.

One of my colleagues decided not to participate and later said the reason was a lack of biological knowledge to assist. I felt bad discovering this after the fact! After chatting, we ended up taking some photos of a herb garden at a local community garden to demonstrate how the app works.

Another was a researcher who majored in insect/plant interactions at grad school. They avoided making an account, preferring to support new users making observations. I think both of the Kawakawa looper observations included their fingers.

App familiarity

I could have spent more time with people demonstrating how the mobile application worked. In particular, new users were getting confused between the notes field and the object ID selection process.

We should have spent some time discussing how to take photos for identification purposes. It looks like few people used more than one photograph in an observation, for example. I noticed quite a few blurry photos too.

Peppering experts among enthusiastic laypeople worked really well

Having a handful of specialists there was a real blessing. They knew what to look for and what identifiers would be looking for. I had made 300 observations before the event, but no one had pointed out that a photo of the reverse side of a plant leaf might be handy.

Publicado el diciembre 6, 2020 07:58 MAÑANA por tim-mcnamara