Poland - iNaturalist World Tour

Thank you very much for this interesting overview :)

@loarie In June we have project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/wildlife-of-the-las-krzyszkowicki and this event do almost 2k observations with over one hundred observers. Maybe this generate growth ? :)

Thanks for pointing out the Wildlife of the Las Krzyszkowicki project @vast, I wasn't aware of it and have added mention of it to the post.

Unfortunately, I think that in Poland still few people know about iNaturalist. I'm in many groups (e.g. on Facebook), where people upload many nature photos and asking for identification - it's a pity that some of these photos don't get here. Until recently, many of my friends - biologists or nature photographers - also had no idea about the existence of such a site. I tried to encourage them to enrich iNaturalist resources with their observations :) Let's hope that next year will be much more observations and active users in Poland!

@slovianka - if you find a good way to convince people to move from Facebook to iNaturalist please tell us. We have a few communities (most notably spiders) in southern Africa which we cannot entice away from Facebook, even with all the cool tools on iNaturalist.

Hello,

In my humble opinion, the problem with 'BioBlitz' with students [especially if you go the same or almost same route with different groups of people] is that it may create loads of duplified observations.. [the same plant, the same site, more or less the same time], particularly of plants, as seems to be the case in the above-mentioned project.. Consequently, in the raw statistics as this 'World Tour' is, this may create a false image of concentration of data in a particular region of the country.
And the second issue I would like to mentoin, generally, not in relation to Poland alone, is that the number of species actually observed [in the wild] will never be accurate until so many people publish here their 'observations' of cultivated flowers etc. - without mentioning it..
all the best,
Wojtek

Anna,
Thanks for your response. I am not criticising the idea of bioblitz or involving students.. My intention was to point out that we should only read critically such results - in the light of the above map etc. - both statistically, as well as phytogeographically [gps for example sometimes 'fly away' whereas actually the observed site is the same]. iNat is obviously for everyone, not just for scientists and perhaps it is even more for non-scientists, so let's involve all people interested in nature!

This was, again, a general opinion - not in relation to Las Krzyszowicki and not in relation to alien wild plants [spontaneous escapers or kenophytes/archaeophytes]. I mean that the number of species displayed by the search results etc. for certain area, e.g. a country, does not necesarily reveal a number of wild species recorded so far for that country - this is because some people do not flag their observations properly [as cultivated]. And surprisingly, there are even cases in which some observers repeatedly seem use such flags but [deliberately?] incorrectly, i.e. flagging obviously cultivated plants [garden flowers, plants in pots etc.] as 'wild' - which means that even if somebody else would like to flag them correctly - as 'cultivated' the system would still display such observations as 'need id' [and potentially RG]!
This problem is general and does not refer to Poland or to any other country alone, as I mentioned before. When a number of observations is high, as for example in Italy, it becomes really difficult to identify such cases..
pozdrawiam
Wojtek