Päiväkirja-arkisto kohteelle kesäkuu 2018

kesäkuu 11, 2018

Progress update for Moths of Ontario

Hi everyone - this project is turning into quite the success. In the last month or so we've gone from 30,000 to 35,000 observations, and are now over 2,000 species recorded for the province. Ontario also seems to be ahead of other provinces in using iNat at this time, and something like 70% of the Canadian moth observations are from Ontario, which is bit above (ok, more than double) the proportionate share based on population distribution. Congratulations and thanks for all of your efforts and photos.

As some of you know, the information from these observations is used in a few places: iNaturalist has distribution maps, the Toronto Entomologists's Association uses the data for it's moth atlas, and third parties like gbif.org collect the data as well. I co-edit the Ontario Moth Atlas and I encourage you to check it out if you haven't seen it. The TEA aggregates data from iNat as well as other institutional and private sources to try and create a comprehensive research database and online distribution of Ontario moths.

A couple of requests for people to help the community as the volume of information grows:

  1. Please help by contributing identifications when you can, even for single observations. This is a community effort, no individual is responsible for any task, so if someone is IDing your moths, it's because they are volunteering to do so. Please reciprocate, it does;t have to be the same person, just pick some observation on the project page - or ID some plants if you are more comfortable with those. Expertise is not required, if you know one moth well, you can provide IDs on just those observations.
  2. The TEA and others that use the information from these observations are trying to sort adult sightings from egg, larva and pupae observations. The TEA has specific flights times for adult moths in the Atlas, and iNat has seasonality graphs drawn from iNat records (click on the "life stage" tab https://inaturalist.ca/taxa/235767-Eacles-imperialis-pini). To help out with this effort, please use the "Insect life stage" field when you are entering observations on iNat, it dramatically increase the ease with which we can use the information in your observations.

Thanks!

Julkaistu kesäkuu 11, 2018 02:07 AP. käyttäjältä dkaposi dkaposi | 0 kommenttia | Jätä kommentti