Last day of the BioBlitz!

Happy Sunday morning everyone! Today is going to be the last day to make observations for the AppState BioBlitz 2022. If you want to participate and have not had a chance yet, get out there and observe! Parking on campus is free for all today, no permit required on any of the surface lots on Sundays.

Progress Update:
It has been quite a week and it's not over yet! A total of 4,494 observations of 863 taxa have been made so far, of which 3,220 observations (72%) and 736 taxa are counted in the project with 629 having been identified to species.

Why the difference between observations made vs. counted? The ones that are not counted are almost all cultivated plants. The purpose of this BioBlitz is to document what species occur naturally within AppState boundaries, not what was put there by landscaping crews. Observations should be of wild organisms, and stuff planted around campus won't qualify. See previous journal posts and the first video that was posted for examples and ideas what to observe instead.

Q: I made some of those observations of planted things. Do I have to delete them?

A: No! While they won't count towards our ongoing BioBlitz, they are still data and may be useful for other purposes. I made some of these observations myself for example to document plants still blooming at this time of year, which may be useful for tracking phenology. In the past, we've had students help with a tree inventory on campus, which needs updating and will benefit from your observations of planted trees. Just make sure to check "captive/cultivated" aka "not wild" on these observations to mark their status on iNaturalist.

Last day to get out there and add some more observations and species! The date that counts for the challenge is the observation date (date and time on your photos), not the upload date (when you posted to iNaturalist). We'll have a bit of a grace period to upload pictures taken this week before pulling the stats to determine the winners in our various categories.

We will also have some follow-up activities to help with identifying species and observations with the best pictures. If you browse the observations in the project and come across some you really like, hit that star to add it to your favorites to let us know! This will make them show up among the observations with the most comments and favs on the bottom of the Stats page. We'll have a monitor with a slide show in the Rankin lobby at the Geology Museum to showcase some of these observations.

Posted on October 30, 2022 12:04 PM by annkatrinrose