State of the Syrphs - 1-Jul-2024

So here we are! It was almost exactly a year ago that we made this project active in an attempt to create a team for the curation of iNatUK Hoverflies and to improve the data quality going through to HRS. We now have over 100 members, some have joined for the information, and some - with varying degrees of experience - have become really active participants in the task above. That's all great. Thanks to everyone who has joined, read, participated in, used or enjoyed anything in this group :).

I don't want to make this an annual review though - it is about the transition from June to July as usual. But now all the graphs have 12 months of data so...

Annotations and the Euro 24 Annotatathon Tour

One of the most immediate impacts of the project was to vastly increase the proportion of observations receiving sex and life stage annotations. Before the project these were less than 20%. Quite a few people got on board with this straight away as something they could do. This is the last time you will see that initial impact in the graph below (I'm only going to keep 13 months of data on these graphs). We maintained our high proportions this month: here are the proportions of new observations that received annotations before the end of the month.

And the total proportion of all UK hoverflies annotated with sex continues to grow, and is now over 75% for the first time:

You can see there the huge impact of the original 'Annotatathon' event back in November. (Please remember that a few hundred old observations have been left deliberately unannotated with life stage because they cause problems for HRS - please do not add life stage annotations to any remaining pre-2022 observations)

As a bit of a side-hustle, during the Euro 24 football tournament it was suggested that we annotate observations during the matches from whichever countries are playing. During the tournament so far I think we've added about 60,000 annotations! I've been posting updates here - the next update will be after the round of 16. For participating European countries outside the UK the proportion of observations with an annotation has increased from 27% to 35% for sex, and from 26% to 43% for life stage. Some smaller countries have been fully completed.

Observations

5500+ observations were uploaded in June: the most ever in a month. They provisionally included 113 species, matching last month's record. Here are some species to look out for in July.

June's highlights include: Microdon devius, Pelecocera tricincta, Sphegina elegans and S. sibirica, Mallota cimbiciformis, Pipizella viduata, Epistrophe diaphana and a flurry of Myolepta dubia.

(note these are the species uploaded during the month, not necessarily observed during the month)

Identifications

Incredibly, the increase in the NeedsID pile is again just a few hundred, despite the increase in observations. For two weeks in early June we absolutely smashed any previous record for IDs - nearly 3500 a week! This is testament to those who do a regular bit on new records each day, and some people I notice taking first steps into the world of identifying - all adding up.

35 genera are up, 31 unchanged and 5 down.

If you are interested in helping with identifications, don't feel you need to do it alone - you can always tag in myself or another of the top UK identifiers if you want someone to check what you think. A safe way to get started is to try identifying things that don't yet have a species ID - that way your ID does not make it research grade. Gradually, and with a few mistakes, you will gain confidence. You can find a URL for this task here. Clearly someone has been doing this, because the number stuck above genus has decreased by 5% this month! Well done you :)

Here is the breakdown by tribe, and the deeper dive into Syrphini as usual:

Obscured Locations

Another thing we have tried to do over the last year is spread the word that using obscured locations for privacy settings causes problems for recording schemes (not just the hoverfly scheme). NBN recommend pinned locations as an alternative. The proportion of obscured locations in June was below 3% for the first time since December (when total numbers were smaller and therefore proportions more random). I don't know the reason for that - whether some people have changed their settings or whether it is random variation.

So finally, thanks to all of you who have engaged with this project in whatever way. I think we've made a difference both to people on iNat, and hopefully also to the recording scheme as they field the iNat data that goes through to them. I want to give a particular shout-out to @rkl who has recently done a great job feeding back whenever HRS have corrected a mistaken ID fed through from iNat.

Happy Syrphing for July!

All data collected on 30th June 2024

Posted on July 1, 2024 12:16 PM by matthewvosper