xris's Journal

I've just gotten settled in at home from attending the conference. I'll be processing it for a long time!

It was great to meet so many folks. Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like to stay in touch!

Yours in Nature,
Xris

Some notes on how to search locality records of Hymenoptera when evaluating candidate observations for inclusion in the New Bee and Wasp Locality Records.

Although my focus is New York state, where I make most of my observations, most of these are global in reach. I've noted those that aren't, e.g.: BugGuide.

Searchable Online Databases

• iNaturalist - Hymenoptera Observations: Click the Filter button, and fill in Place for your Locality. Do not try to use the Location field available on the search page. That is unreliable for this type of search.
• BugGuide (US and Canada): Search for your Taxon to get Matching Images. Click the Data tab to see a map of records showing U.S State and Canada Province occurrences, and a table showing them by Month in each State/Province. In the table, click the State and view the detail records, which include county. You must have an account and be logged in for the table to be clickable.

• GBIF: Search Occurrences by Taxon. Use Administrative areas to limit search to a state, or a set of counties. Examples:
  ** NYC (multi-county municipality) comprises has 5 boroughs, each of which is a NY state county: New York (Manhattan), Bronx, Kings (Brooklyn), Queens, and Richmond (Staten Island) counties. To limit the GBIF search to NYC, append the search url with &gadm_gid=USA.33.3_1&gadm_gid=USA.33.24_1&gadm_gid=USA.33.32_1&gadm_gid=USA.33.44_1&gadm_gid=USA.33.42_1
  ** Long Island (an island) comprises Kings, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk counties: &gadm_gid=USA.33.24_1&gadm_gid=USA.33.42_1&gadm_gid=USA.33.53_1&gadm_gid=USA.33.31_1

• DiscoverLife: Can't search by locality, but you can search by Taxon and zoom in on a browsable map.
• iDigBio: Data portal, similar to GBIF. Aggregates public records from other sources.

Collections

These are helpful for confirming absence, or checking textual details, of records found in the general databases above.

• American Museum of Natural History (AMNH): https://emu-prod.amnh.org/imulive/iz.html. Only use this when looking up specific records. It's extremely slow.
• Ohio State University (OSU): https://mbd-db.osu.edu/: Select Triplehorn Insect Collection, then search by Identified As. The Country and State search fields are disabled. State is displayed in the table, but you need to view each record by Unique ID to see the Date and Locality information.
• Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (SMNH), Entomology Collections Database: Search by Scientific Name and Province/State.
• Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS)

My Candidate Observations

Refuted Candidates

For those I thought might be records, but proved not to be.

To be added as a Comment on an Observation that has no location.

Adapted from the following Frequently Used Responses:

• Missing Location
• Incorrect Location

Missing location.

If you add the location, more people will be likely to see it and help with identification. There can be similar looking species in different parts of the world, and the location can be an important clue in identifying what you saw.

To add a location, click the "Edit" button, then use the search to type in a location and/or use the map to zoom and drop a pinpoint where the organism was observed.

If you don't want to reveal the exact location, another option is to select “obscured”, which will only display the approximate region and not the precise map pinpoint. More information about geoprivacy can be found here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#geoprivacy

Published to my blog because iNat doesn't support photos in posts.

Insect Year in Review