Project Update 5: Paper published!

In some great news, the short paper put together by @atronox, @neontetraploid, @gcwarbler and myself has now been accepted and published in the Journal of Insect Conservation. You can check it out at https://rdcu.be/cylip.

Since my last update back in June, we've continued to have more and more members join the project, with 932 at the time of writing, so it's great to see so many enthusiastic people involved.

As usual, I'll also take this opportunity to reiterate the project rules/criteria.

1. Please do not add photographs of dead specimens to the project. Often, observations depicting things such as dead marine species at fish markets or empty snail shells will get uploaded to the project. Whilst these are certainly cool records, especially when they are indeed the first known photos of those species, they fall outside the scope of this project, and I will remove them.
2. Please only add observations when the photographs are the first known photos anywhere, not just the first ones to be uploaded to iNat. I try to vet all/as many observations that come into the project as I can, but inevitably some slip under the radar and I miss them. So if you think you have a suitable observation, and you're not 100% sure it's the first known photo, spend a bit of time looking through google images, GBIF, online databases, etc., to see if photos already exist and pre-date yours.

Two other notes:
'First known' photographs does not equal 'first time I've seen this species'!! I regularly remove observations from the project where hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of other observations of that species have already been uploaded to iNat, let alone to other databases and sites online.

It's ok to post the first known photograph(s) of e.g. the male of a species, even when the female has been well-documented previously, and vice versa. Ditto for life stages of things like insects. This was one of the reasons why I named the project "....living specimens" rather than "...living species". However, if you do intend to upload the first photo of a male/female, certain life stage, please explicitly note somewhere in that observation, whether in a comment, the description, etc., that this is the case. There are many species for which I remove observations from the project due to pre-existing observations; in some of these cases, it may be a first-time photograph of a male or female, which is suitable for the project, but the observation in question has no annotations, information, or explanations of any kind that this is the case, so please include this so your observation doesn't get booted out!

Also, if you're uploading an observation that is only ID'ed to genus, family etc., because it's an undescribed species, please note that explicitly somewhere in the observation as well. Without this information, it's really difficult/impossible for me to assess whether your observation should be retained or kicked out of the project, and in most cases I will remove it if I am unsure.

Posted on 24 de setembro de 2021, 01:40 AM by thebeachcomber