Diario de lynnharper

I've had great fun learning about galls over the last couple of years vis iNaturalist, largely because of Adam Kranz, @megachile. Now he's going to give a Zoom talk to my local Athol Bird and Nature Club. Here I'll quote from the club's newsletter. You all are invited!

Oaks and Wasps: Shaping Novel Organs in the Seasonal Round
Adam Kranz, via Zoom

Join us in person at the Millers River Environmental Center in Athol, MA, to watch the Zoom presentation together. Oak gall wasps take advantage of the annual flow of resources throughout an oak tree to produce beautiful and distinctive novel plant organs to feed and protect them. With an estimated 1000 species in North America, each producing two different galls per year, this symbiosis is one of the most engrossing puzzles in nature. Adam Kranz would like to equip you to help him put it together.

Adam Kranz is one of the co-founders of www.Gallformers.org an online database for amateur and academic naturalists studying plant galls in North America. He lives in Austin, TX.

You are invited to a Zoom webinar.

When: May 10, 2023 07:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Topic: Oaks and Wasps: Shaping Novel Organs in the Seasonal Round

Register in advance for this webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_eHhPGrokR4mspgwFJ7-jcQ

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

My local nature club is offering what should be a fascinating talk this Wednesday night, and luckily it's via Zoom, as well as in-person, so you all can attend. Here are the details from the Athol Bird and Nature Club's email newsletter:

Wednesday April 12, 2023, 7:00 PM “The Guests of Ants” Christina L. Kwapich, PhD

This talk will explore the hidden biodiversity inside ant nests, and the behavioral mechanisms diverse parasites employ to infiltrate ant societies. Some intruders tickle ant mouth parts to steal regurgitated meals, while others use specialized organs and glandular secretions to entice ants or calm their aggression. Once able to “speak the language,” these outsiders can masquerade as ants. Suddenly colony members can no longer distinguish friend from foe.

Christina L. Kwapich, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Ecology at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and the co-author of the book The Guests of Ants: How Myrmecophiles Interact with Their Hosts (2022, Harvard University Press). Her laboratory examines the organization of labor in seed harvesting ant societies, subterranean ant nest architecture, and ant guests. In person at the Millers River Environmental Center, 100 Main Street, Athol, MA 01331, or by Zoom.

Register in advance for this webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Z-Y4dR2sTkS3Ta-8BeGBng After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
.......

I hope to see some of you there! By the way, next month's talk for the Athol Bird and Nature Club is about oak gall wasps, given by Adam Kranz, who is megachile here on iNaturalist. It will also be available on Zoom. I'll post more about that talk in a few weeks.

Guess what starts four weeks from today? The world-wide City Nature Challenge, of course! Clear your calendar for Friday, April 28th, through Monday, May 1st, because we are going to have fun!

This year, I'm helping to organize the Western Massachusetts City Nature Challenge, so I'm inviting all of you to join that project and help out. We're nailing down the final details on 15 workshops and field trips for you; in two weeks, we'll publish that list as a journal post in the project.

If you've never participated in the annual City Nature Challenge before, you should know that everyone is welcome to help out in this global bioblitz, whether you're an expert in some obscure taxon or you're completely new to learning about the natural world. The real aim of the CNC is to connect people with the natural world around them, whether in cities or the smallest rural towns. Sure, we'll keep track of how many species we find, but even more importantly, we hope to encourage the most people possible to post the highest number of observations possible during those four days. And you don't even have to figure out how to add your observations to the Western Mass CNC project; iNaturalist will automatically add any observation you make on those four days, within the four western counties of Massachusetts, to the project.

So start thinking about your favorite places to visit in spring, and join us for the Western Mass CNC!

You all are invited to join the second annual New England plant ID-a-thon! Link here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/2023-new-england-plants-id-a-thon-feb-24-26

Like last year, we'll spend 48 hours, from 7 PM Friday night to 7 PM Sunday night, identifying Needs ID plants in New England and helping to clear out the backlog of observations before the next field season . Not to mention spending a cold winter weekend immersed in the greenery we all miss at this time of year! (Surely it's not just me who is sick of winter already?)

Head on over to the project link, join up, and I promise we'll have a good time!

So I thought I'd discuss making identifications here in a journal post and see if any of you want to comment.

A year or so ago, I committed to making lots of IDs for other people on their iNat observations. Currently, I've made over 80,000 IDs, almost all on Needs ID observations (rather than on observations that are already at Research Grade). Yay, me!

But the combination of winter coming on here in New England, no fun trips on the horizon, and the daunting prospect of enormous piles of observations needing IDs has got me down. So, this is a plea for help. Not help in the sense of my mental health, but in the sense of asking you to help with making IDs.

I'm curious: if you've never made IDs for others, why not? Do you think you need to be a expert to help? Nope, you don't; I'm certainly not an expert in anything. (Which reminds me - thank you to everyone who corrects my mis-identifications!) Are you just too busy with work/school/family/the day to day detritus of life? OK, you're excused; go play outside whenever you do get a chance. Are you just ... anxious about making IDs? I hear you - I'm just beginning to learn to ID an easy fly and I'm all worried I'll screw it up. But, really, a few mistakes do not matter.

If you'd like to try making IDs and want some hand-holding, I am more than willing to help. Just send me a private message or comment on this post and I'll do what I can.

Another thing you can do to make the lives of identifiers easier is to improve the quality of your observations. I'm not just talking photo quality here, although photos in focus are always appreciated. I'm talking about remembering to add an initial ID when you upload an observation. Even a very general ID like Birds or Mosses will get your observation in front of bird and moss IDers more quickly, and it means generalists like me don't need to spend time adding a general ID to observations that are labeled Unknown.

It also helps if you can do a little research, on or off iNat, about what characters are needed to ID certain species and then try to remember to photograph those characters when you encounter the species. For example, I learned that one of the identifying characters of Black Oak is the hairiness of the vein angles on the undersides of the leaves. Now, I try to remember to photograph not just the overall shape of the leaves, but also a close-up of the vein angles on the undersides. Again, if you're new to all this, feel free to ask me (or, indeed, most IDers on iNat) what resources to use to ID an organism to species level. (Hint: for plants in New England, use Go Botany.)

Keeping up with the ever-increasing flood of new observations needing IDs is something a lot of hard-core identifiers discuss often in the iNat forum. Right now, there are close to 1.8 MILLION observations just in New England that are at Needs ID. Sure, many of them can never reach Research Grade, but I bet at least half of them could be IDed to species. Indeed, around 750,000 are already at species level, just needing an agreeing ID to reach Research Grade (or a disagreeing ID, if the species ID is wrong).

So, think about helping. I'd love it if you have any comments on this, either publicly on this post or privately via message. Thanks!

I promised you a link to MIIDGE 2022, the Massachusetts Invertebrate Interlude Days with Great Expectations - here you go: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/miidge-2022-massachusetts-invertebrate-interlude-days-with-great-expectations

Come join us!

July 1, half-way through the year. Another beautiful sunny day here, but I'm hoping for lots of rain tomorrow, because it's really getting dry around here.

This post is a random assortment of things on my mind...

The Athol Bird and Nature Club is putting on MIIDGE again this year - the Massachusetts Invertebrate Interlude Days with Great Expectations. We're coordinating with National Moth Week and the infamous Moth Ball; MIIDGE will be Friday, July 22nd, through Sunday, July 24th. Once I get the iNat MIIDGE project set up, I'll post another reminder here. The Moth Ball will be the evening of July 23rd; contact Dave Small (davidhsmall on iNat) for details. Let's hope for good weather!

I had so much fun doing the City Nature Challenge in Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley this spring that I volunteered to help coordinate it for next year. If you live in or near Franklin, Hampshire, and Hampden counties, put April 28 through May 1, 2023, on your calendar, and we will have FUN.

Species Distributions
When I go out iNatting, I try to make an observation of every species I think can be identified, because I think iNat data are often most useful as records of species distributions. Of course, iNat data are heavily biased by where observers are looking. For example, here's a map of Eastern White Pine observations (both RG and non-RG) in MA: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=2&subview=map&taxon_id=52391. What this map really shows, at least at this moment, is the distribution of iNaturalists - most of the records are in the greater Boston area, where most of the people are - even though Eastern White Pines are essentially everywhere across Massachusetts in reality.

The map for Eastern Newt, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=2&subview=map&taxon_id=27805, gives a quite different impression. Here, most of the observations are west of the City of Worcester. There are three things going on here, I think. First, in southeastern MA, Eastern Newts usually don't transform into red efts and go walkabout in their early adulthood; they usually go directly from larvae with gills to aquatic adults. This is probably because much of southeastern MA is sandy, too dry to make an eft happy. Since most people who post observations of newts are photographing red efts, the adult newts in southeastern MA are under-counted, so to speak. Second, the urban and dense suburbia of greater Boston is no longer good habitat for newts, particularly when they are red efts - too many roads, too many cars! That's also true for many parts of southeastern MA, alas. Third, when people go hiking in western MA and DO see an eft, they're thrilled and take a photo for iNat. (I mean, they really are cute, let's face it!)

Now, there's a lot more going on with the apparent distributions of even just these two common species, but you get the idea. Sometimes, I daydream about a ten-year project that would be a fine-scale atlas of the plants of Massachusetts. There are already floral atlases at the county and (I think) town scales, but what if we could map the plant species in every square mile (or kilometer, or whatever)? What would that show us? How would the map look different in 50 years or a century? What would it take to motivate naturalists to participate in what promises to be a pretty intensive project?

Anyway, daydreams like this drive me to photograph every species (but I really should learn graminoids) and to go walk places I've never been, especially if there aren't many iNat observations in those new places.

Which is just what I'm going to do for the next half-ear and beyond. Enjoy summer!

You know what starts in two weeks, yes? It's the City Nature Challenge! Go look at how many areas around the globe are participating: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2022.

Four days of tromping everywhere, looking at everything, getting wet and muddy and, I hope, not tick-ridden, uploading hundreds of observations, confirming IDs on hundreds of other people's observations, and glorying in SPRING! It's FUN!!!

Also, there might be ice cream. And you can ignore the garden and housework without guilt, because this is for science (for a loose definition of science). It's at least raising environmental awareness, which is, frankly, more important.

But I'm torn this year. In the last three years, I've mostly done the Boston City Nature Challenge (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2022-boston-area ; it includes much of eastern Massachusetts), either as myself or as Mass Wildlife when I was still working. In 2020, I spent two days in the Boston area and two in the Pioneer Valley City Nature Challenge area (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2022-pioneer-valley ; the three counties through which the Connecticut River flows). The Boston CNC is very well-organized; over 1,800 people participated last year. The Pioneer Valley CNC, which was started in early 2020 out of UMass Amherst, has been hampered by the pandemic; only 189 people participated in 2021. They are looking for people to help organize the Valley CNC, but it's too late this year to get up and fully running.

I don't live in either CNC region (anyone want to start a Worcester County, MA, CNC?). Doing the CNC in the Boston area involves a minimum of an hour's drive, up to three hours one way to get down to the Cape. That's a lot of driving in four days - not terribly environmentally sensible. I can drive 15 minutes and be in the Pioneer Valley CNC area; the farthest reaches of that area are maybe an hour and a half drive.

What I'm inclined to do is work the Valley CNC for four days and call it scouting for next year, 2023, when maybe I'd be foolish enough to work on organizing the colleges and universities, the environmental groups, and the local iNatters to do a full-on Valley CNC. In the my dreams, I'd like to see more City Nature Challenge regions in Massachusetts: greater Boston, Worcester County, the Pioneer Valley, and the Berkshires. Not unreasonable, and why not have more CNCs across New England while we're at it?

What do you all think?

If you're interested in plants in New England, or just want to learn how to make IDs on iNaturalist, this project is for you! Come join the project at https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/new-england-plants-id-a-thon-feb-25-27-2022

If you've never joined a project before, look for the Join button towards the top right of the page I just linked to. Click that, answer a couple of questions from iNat (the answers don't matter for this project), and you're in! You definitely don't need to be an expert to make IDs on iNat (I'm not), but if you can identify Queen Anne's Lace or Pickerelweed or Striped Maple or Oriental Bittersweet or other common plants like that, you can help out. Making IDs on other people's observations on iNat is an important part of the process towards getting more people involved with the natural world, plus you'll learn a lot.

And what else are you planning for a late February weekend during a pandemic, anyway?

Any questions, feel free to ask!

Happy New Year, everyone! Let's hope 2022 is better than 2021 and 2020.

I love to make plans. Carrying out those plans - maybe not so much, but making the plans is great fun. So, I am going to set out here some plans, goals, ideas for 2022.

First, let's note where I was this morning in terms of iNat statistics: I'm up to 23,131 observations, 44,686 identifications for others, and 2,362 species in total. Off-iNat, I made 83 reports of state-listed or uncommon plants and animals to the Massachusetts Natural Heritage Program, and one or two similar reports to Vermont's Natural Heritage. (By the way, except for rare occasions, I don't post observations of MA-listed species on iNat. Uncommon, non-listed species - yes.) I am happy with those numbers, especially because I had an absolute ball going all over the place this past year.

Now, numbers like these don't mean much in terms of appreciating the natural world or contributing to Real Science, but they are easy to track, so here are my goals for 2022: I'd like to make 10,000 more observations (so 33,131 in total). I'd like to make twice as many identifications for others as my own observations, so that's a goal of 66,262 IDs in total by the end of 2022. That means I need to make 21,576 IDs this year, or about 60 a day. (This is where carrying out my plan starts to get tricky.)

I'd like to do more moth trapping this year - moth-attracting, really, since I very rarely collect specimens. Last year, after the wash-out that was July, I hardly attracted anything to my trap, so I kind of gave up on the end of the season.

I bought a new tent in the spring of last year. Did I use it at all? No. That is going to change in 2022. Ditto the kayak I haven't paddled in at least a decade. Think of all the fun floating around in a pond, photographing aquatic plants and damselflies that alight on the boat and the occasional turtle who pokes their head up.

I want to make more day trips to other New England states and to New York, since trips farther afield are still likely to be on hold because of COVID. I went on four or five such day trips last year, and they were fun. Feel free to tell me where to go!

I'd like to begin to learn fungi. I've started by learning that slime molds are no longer part of Fungi, as they were half a century ago when I learned basic biology; now, they are part of Protozoa.

I've gotten lazy about plants. I know some, but I've stopped carrying field guides into the field and looking up, say, how to tell the ashes apart. Or the elms. Maybe I'll tackle asters or goldenrods this year. And someday, I will learn once and for all how to tell Carpinus from Ostrya (maybe). I should make a list of plants (and other species, for that matter) that I've never seen and make an effort to go find them. Green Dragon, for example.

Finally, I'd like to encourage and train other iNatters how to make IDs on other peoples' observations. Go read iNat's blog post from May of 2020 on the occasion of iNat reaching one million observers, here: https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/35758-we-ve-reached-1-000-000-observers Note especially the part where they say, "To put in perspective what a small fraction of the iNaturalist community of identifiers is, ... 51% of users have posted an observation (blue and yellow), but only 4% have made identifications for other people (yellow and pink). Nonetheless, these 107,000 identifiers have generated 53 million identifications for other people compared with 43 million observations generated by 1,265,000 observers (from now on I’m [the writer] counting all observers, not just observers of verifiable observations as I prefer to do because the data were easier to fetch, but the patterns are the same)."

To that end, I'm going to start with running an ID-a-thon for New England plants towards the end of February. Give me a couple of weeks to get organized, but after that, I'm going to make some journal posts in the project about how to make IDs - not how to tell plants apart, but walking the reader through the mechanics of the clicks and such that make up an ID. Feel free at any point to ask me questions, even questions you think are stupid questions, because, trust me, it was a bit of a learning curve for me, too.

And I plan on having fun. Going places I've never been before. Maybe meeting - safely, in the field, no huddling over field guides - other iNatters. Eating more ice cream than I should. Finding weird galls and leafminers. Watching eagles and Somatochloras soar overhead; ditto for fish and turtles under my kayak. It'll be grand. I hope to see you out there!