reallifeecology's Journal

I heard from @carrieseltzer (National Geographic Society) that the 25th of this month is the official NPS centennial to the day. The goal is to total 100K observations by this day. I was heading down to the panhandle of Florida to work on a project that EOL (and partners) are conducting - The Okaloosa SCIENCE Community Project. I stopped midway through Alabama and turned around for the Great Smoky Mountains NP.

@alorenz
@marie

So, here I am, at Purchase Knob, the research station for this side of the park. Somehow I just happened to end up specifically at this place that is a relatively new addition to the park and isn't yet in the kml shape file. I blitzed out all day yesterday before getting the info late last night in the middle of a grueling, bad wifi signal uploading session.

As it turns out, @forester93, the data ranger for NPS told me that the new shape file should be uploaded today. Wow, thanks Simon!

Anywho, I'll be adding as many observations as I can over the next week to try to help the process along. We're gonna make it to 100K!

I love being part of this incredible community!

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