100K observations with 4 days to spare

Internet access in the number one issue in my daily life. I have a MiFi device that can convert cell signal to WiFi, but cell signal is surprisingly unavailable geographically. So, all I can do is to go to a public WiFi location to do big data dumps in small batches. Yesterday was my NPS data dump day. When I logged on to start uploading we were right around 99,850.

I had just gotten back from a mini expedition in a relatively newly acquired chunk of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park - Puchase Knob, on the North Carolina side of the park near Waynesville. Being up on top of the mountain enabled a surprising amount of cell signal and would load the iNat App "explore" tab. I decided that I wanted to document all the surrounding trails independently. That way, whatever trail or area a person is exploring, they could get a detailed reference to the things around them. I have been thinking about this a lot lately - fair observations - and will try to cover that in another post soon.

As it turned out, that part of the park just happened to be outside the current shape file that is incorporated into iNat. So, the data will not be counted for the NPS 2016 BioBlitz, at least not until the shape file is fixed.

Still, I had gotten back from the park and it was time to load the data. I didn't know we were going to be so close. While loading the obs from my trip (including the ones for the excluded part of the park) I got to watch the number climb. What perfect timing! Usually timing for me is not so perfectly aligned. Suddenly the number jumped to over 100,100. YES! I still have a lot more park data to add, but I'm glad my luck balanced out to see the iNat/Nat Geo/NPS goal become accomplished.

We are the People, Science is our Tool, We Are Awesome!

@carrieseltzer
@chuck522
@forester93
@loarie
@kueda
@sambiology

Julkaistu elokuu 22, 2016 06:54 IP. käyttäjältä reallifeecology