Caterpillars of Eastern North America is now a collector project!
The iNaturalist team recently released updates allowing projects to use annotation-based rules. As such, I have converted the caterpillar project to a collector. This means that all observations of Lepidoptera in the project area (North America east of the 100th meridian) that are annotated Life Stage = Larva will be added to the project automatically. This will relieve the burden on our project curators somewhat, as observations no longer have to be manually added to the project one at a time (although making sure caterpillar observations are annotated appropriately will still take some work). Thanks to @tiwane and the other developers for making this happen!
Thanks also to @bouteloua, @kimberlietx, @coatlicue, and everyone else who helped with the big push last year to get all of our project observations annotated when the annotations feature was added. This put us in a good position to take advantage of the new collector project rules without having to do lots of catch-up work.
Also, kudos to @christine123 for topping 1,000 caterpillar observations (more than twice as many as anyone else!), @kchiasson for having observations of the most caterpillar species (nearly 200!), and @k8thegr8 & @ericwilliams for being the top caterpillar-identifiers.
