Earth Day 2018

Yesterday was Earth Day and I spent part of it at the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center. Besides being a great place and a great day for a nice long walk in the woods, this was sort of a trial run for the City Nature Challenge next weekend. On Earth Day I logged 37 observations and uploaded 63 photos! The Arboretum has a number of nature hikes scheduled for the City Nature Houston Challenge; I don't know yet if I will participate in them or observe elsewhere, but I wanted to see what it would be like to blitz a bunch of field observations, and hone my iNaturalist app skills. One of the first things I learned was that it goes a lot faster if you use the camera within the app, and that it automatically added location (which the app hadn't been doing before), sometimes specifying exactly which trail I was on! Those two things made the app tremendously faster and easier to use.

I tried to get as much diversity as possible, but plants (and fungus) are my natural "go-to" for photos at the Arboretum, and it was an unusually chilly damp morning so there just wasn't a whole lot of creatures out and moving. I saw birds I couldn't get a picture of, and ants I couldn't get the phone's focus to lock onto, and a Gulf Fritillary that zipped across the trail by the meadow so fast it was out of range in the blink of an eye. Even the plants had a hard time staying still for photos as a cool wind gusted through some locations. I added all the observations to the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center Project here on iNaturalist, in the hope that someone monitoring the project would be able to provide IDs since all observations were on trails and I don't think I saw anything particularly rare or unusual---or for that matter, inconspicuous (except for the ladybeetle which was on the underside of the leaf). The hardest part of this trial run for the challenge was deciding what to take a picture of. At any given spot there were dozens, if not hundreds, of species within a 360 degree view. I went for easily ID'd highly conspicuous wildlowers, and a random assortment of things I simply did not know with any degree of precision, which I thought it likely that someone else familiar with the Houston Arboretum trails would know. The visitor center always has a sampling of plants, especially blooming plants, in small vases with the genus and species labeled. I used that to ID a number of flowers, but otherwise relied on suggestions from iNaturalist, or marked Unknown. One frustrating thing was that none of my observations were uploaded real time; they were all marked "waiting to upload" until after we left the Arboretum. So there could be no communication or coordination between me and any others also making observations on the trails at the same time. I think that will make IDing observations in the Arboretum for the City Nature Houston Challenge more challenging than it needs to be.

For all the common flowers I observed, what Earth Day at the Houston Arboretum really taught me was how very much I did not know about how very many species. It also showed how inclined I am to stay within my comfort zone, observing things I usually observe, or things I knew could be easily ID'ed. iNaturalist is all about identification, and so many observations go without any specific ID, that if one wants one's observations validated by having ID improved or confirmed, then one quickly (within a week of installing the app) learns to stick with things that can be easily ID'd like flowering plants. "Easily identified" is helpful for the City Nature Challenge which needs big numbers and fast IDs to be able to handle large numbers of species, but it's a poor criteria for observations in other circumstances.

Posted on April 23, 2018 05:29 PM by