One Hundred and One Species

With over 200 observations, and having just tipped over 100 species, here are some things we’ve learned from this project already as novice iNaturalist users.

The project was started on October 1st, 2020, which probably explains some of the distribution of research grade observations - currently 60% birds! Although it includes observations made before the project was set up, there were only a few, spread over three years.

Yellow Flower and dark green leaves

Despite being a meadow, we’ve got relatively few research grade plant records (25). This is partly due to the season, but it has to be partly down to the difficulty of verifying plant IDs. It can be tricky to take pictures which show all the characteristics necessary for someone else to ID the plant. And photos can’t show characteristics like smell, which can be an important part of identification. If you are using Seek, you may not even know what someone else needs to see to verify the record. So as spring comes around, this is definitely something we’ll be looking to improve.

Brown and cream bird of prey sitting in the bare branches of a tree

The opposite of plants, birds are very easy, and often incredibly fast, to get community IDs. Of the research grade species recorded on the meadow, nearly 40% are birds. The most observed species (and probably individual) is the kestrel, which makes sense because I find it really hard to walk past without taking a picture of that beautiful bird.

chunky black beetle climbing the trunk of a small tree

The next biggest group of observations is insects. Though we have quite a few butterflies from 2019 and 2020, this is mostly a random selection of flying things that have hung on into autumn and some insect-caused plant galls. As spring and summer come around, I expect this group will get much bigger - only four beetles and two bees so far, even though they are pretty much everywhere in the right season.

In a typical example of the fast moving state of iNaturalist data, in the time I have been writing this, we have had another species bumped up to research grade, taking us to One Hundred and Two species. Already closer to our next hundred species. And who knows how many species the meadow supports?

Posted on January 18, 2022 03:12 PM by hestan hestan

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