Duck River Survey finished

After almost 380 hours of surveying, I finally wrapped up my survey of Wategora Reserve along Duck River in western Sydney. All up, 1926 species observed in an area of just 25 ha.

All observations at: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/wategora-reserve-cooks-river-clay-plain-scrub-forest

Summary of survey, and link to download final 427 page report + fully annotated/illustrated checklist, at: https://tmesaglio.github.io/duck-river-biodiversity-survey/

Huge thanks to everyone who helped ID my observations

Posted on 05 December, 2022 06:14 by thebeachcomber thebeachcomber

Comments

Great work beachcomber

Posted by hughberry over 1 year ago

Incredible job!

Posted by spyne over 1 year ago

Awesome work!

Posted by d_kurek over 1 year ago

I had an information overload with all the new plant names today, I couldn't possibly remember them all. I'll upload a bunch of new microscopic species tomorrow. This is an extremely impressive effort. I never imagined anyone could be so familiar with a site.

Posted by douch about 1 year ago

I'm curious why you restricted your Wategora Reserve iNaturalist project to only include observations by yourself. I mean, if I understand correctly, your mission is to document the biodiversity in the reserve, but the person documenting it isn't really the point. I guess it's nice to be able to see only your own observations, but this can be done in any project by ticking the Your Observations box. Alternatively, we could create a separate project – one that automatically includes all observations within the reserve's perimeter, regardless of who submitted it. It's up to you of course.

Posted by douch about 1 year ago

ideal scenario, yes, I'd create a place + a collection project, and have the latter filter to that place. But there were two main issues with that approach here:

1 . Because the place is so small, any of my obscured observations would get bumped out of it. I have 30 or so obs of orchids that I've obscured, which would not get captured by the project. Then becomes a hassle to create a second project to manually add those to, and then a third as an umbrella to hold the previous 2.

2 . In the same vein, there are observations from the project for which the location is my house, as I reared insects etc. So those would also get excluded.

This was largely a non-issue for 99% of my survey, as across the almost 3 years, there were just 17 other observers on iNat who contributed a combined total of <150 observations, none of which included species that I hadn't seen myself. So it wasn't until your obs this weekend that anything new was actually there.

Every few weeks I add a new version to my document updating my findings, so I'll incorporate your microscopy in a section next time I do that

Posted by thebeachcomber about 1 year ago

Hmm I see. Yes, until now you weren't missing out on any species by excluding others' observations.

Posted by douch about 1 year ago
Posted by douch about 1 year ago

thanks, some cool stuff in there

Posted by thebeachcomber about 1 year ago

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