newt survey 1/14 - southern half (Aldercroft)

128 dead newts, 0 live newts.
January 14, 2020 (Tuesday) 1pm-3pm
Weather: Dry and partly cloudy, had rained the previous night.
Other roadkill: 1 Western Grey Squirrel, 1 bird, 1 jerusalem cricket, 3 large millipedes, 1 bullfrog (I think, very pancaked).
Coverage: Aldercroft Heights Road intersection to stop sign.
Rainfall: MTD 0.36in, YTD 12.71in (per http://www.weathercat.net/wxraindetail.php?year=2019)
Traffic: 25 vehicles, 8 bicycles, 1 walker.

About 2 dozen of the newts were fresh-looking, the rest varying degrees of weathered. One of the bicyclers said something unintelligible but friendly about newts while zipping by, so I guess he's talked to one of y'all before.

Newt map:

Posted on 15 de janeiro de 2020, 07:37 PM by sea-kangaroo sea-kangaroo

Comentários

It's so sad that not only newts, but lots of other wildlife are killed on this road. It breaks my heart.💔

Publicado por truthseqr cerca de 4 anos antes

@sea-kangaroo, I'm looking at the counts from my spreadsheet versus those reported for the project and your observations are under-represented in the project. According to my spreadsheet, you should have 525 observations in the project, but it shows only 399. I think this is because I've defined the project based on the Lexington Reservoir County Park boundaries and the GPS coordinates for some of your observations fall outside the boundaries, even though the road should be within the boundaries.

I'm not quite sure how to address this. I had the same problem with my own data, so I moved those outside the boundaries to within the boundaries. Ugh! These GPS coordinates are causing a lot of us problems. Some of @anudibranchmom and @newtpatrol observations have been outside the park boundaries as well. Do you have any suggestions for how to deal with this?

Publicado por truthseqr cerca de 4 anos antes

I had a bunch of ideas about project boundaries, but it turns out I just hadn't added 127 of my observations to the project! So that brings me up to 530 dead newts in the project. I double-checked in my observations and I have the same tally of dead & live newt observations as in my journal posts here.

I usually take photos with my "real" camera and correlate them to a GPX track I take with a separate phone app. I'm using "GPSLogger" for Android right now. This last time I did also make a few observations directly though the iNat app, which tended to be slow to get a location fix and often would put the pin on the other side of the reservoir, forcing me to re-set the location. Out of curiosity I did a few test observations of the same landmarks (like the stop sign and that golden cats gate), and it was accurate between iNat, GPSLogger, and Google Street View.

I'm not sure what other people's workflows are like, but some things I've tried that can make a difference with dodgy/slow GPS:
--switching the "breadcrumb" frequency on the GPS logger. too long apart obviously isn't precise, and too close together can jitter around a lot in some terrains, giving me a weird zig-zaggy offroad track. 20-30 seconds seems to work well.

--taking photos through my phone's regular camera app, and putting them in iNat later. my camera app tends to be faster at getting a GPS fix than the iNat app.

Publicado por sea-kangaroo cerca de 4 anos antes

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