Diario de carrieseltzer

I've been in California since Monday evening, and I've had the great pleasure of meeting and spending time with several awesome folks. Today there was a bioblitz in San Jose at the first meeting of the Citizen Science Association. My first bioblitz!

I learned a useful trick from Ken-ichi (aka kueda) who carries a white plastic bowl to keep critters captive for macro photography. My observations with the white background were taken in his bowl.

The event was in a little urban riparian park with its fair share of litter, but Cullen found an arboreal salamander under a cardboard box. Someone else found a California slender salamander from digging around in leaf litter, and that same person spotted a hummingbird nest with two chicks in it (no pics of that from me).

In my last post, I mentioned that the new iNaturalist heat tile map wasn't available for projects yet. Well, it is now, and it's available for users, too!

To see a map of all of your (and only your) observations at once:

1. Find your user ID number. From the dashboard, go to your profile and look at the number in the URL. Mine is http://www.inaturalist.org/people/7580 (that means I created the 7,580th account on iNaturalist-- now it's over 79,000!). If you only see your username (i.e. http://www.inaturalist.org/people/carrieseltzer), make sure you are getting to your profile from the drop down under Dashboard.

2. Copy and paste this URL in your browser: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/map?user_id=7580
   but replace my number 7580 with yours.

3. Hit enter and check out your map. Zoom in far enough and the blocks will change to dots that you can click on and see what they are.

Big thanks to Kent McFarland for his journal post with these instructions from the Vermont Atlas of Life project.

If you want to see all of the observations in the Great Nature Project in this style, check out this link: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/map?project_id=800#2/10/20

Happy mapping!