IndianMoths Data Collection Update : October 2013

As most of you are aware of the iNaturlist project [http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/indianmoths] that we are working as a group. 

We are working on a target of putting together 5000 records by end of this year. Here is the progress so far: We have more than 3400 records in place and we have more than 30 members of the project and already have more than 1000 species posted. The curators Nuwan and Sachin are helping with the ids with major share of work being done by Dr. Roger. 

We have about 10 weeks left for the end of the year. And we have to put together about 1600 records, so about 160 per week. Most of the people interested in Moths have 100s of photos and even if we get 16 members who are willing to put efforts to sort through their photos and upload them as records, they will have to spend less than an hour a week to finish this target that we have. 

If any members unfamiliar with iNaturalist need help, we can certainly extend that. It is fairly simple to use website the records are going to be extremely useful for all us to understand out Moths. So please participate in this activity and let us keep our target.

Another interesting thing we are working on is to get updates about IndianMoths in single place form all the websites. Please check http://diversityindia.org/pages/Moths.html and let us know what more you would like to see and how we can improve it.

Eagerly waiting for all of you, specially members who have not done so yet,  to post records for the project.

Here are some recent records posted on the project.

View more observations from IndianMoths on iNaturalist.org »

May 2013 Update on IndianMoths group data collection efforts

IndianMoths project on iNaturalist is making good progress and we are happy to note that since the last post, we have almost doubled members (20+) and records (2000+). We have some new members like Purnendu and Rohit adding large data sets and members like Nuwan, Dr Vijay Anand and chiefredearth continuing to add records meticulously. 

Here is the updated map of the records:

We still need to cover a lot of ground. Let is start with east coast. Members from Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and West Bengal, please post your records. 

We are hoping to get many more records pouring in, once monsoon hits western ghats and also with National Moth Week programs. If you have not decided yet, look at this map and decide of you want to join an event in your area or organize one.


View NMW DiversityIndia in a larger map  


Let us all contribute and try to surpass the target of 5000 records by end of 2013. 

View more observations from IndianMoths on iNaturalist.org »

IndianMoths group gears up for systematic data collection

I would like to share an encouraging story of how just a handful of Naturalists are putting together a impressive data on Indian moths. I am talking about the IndianMoths project on iNaturalist. http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/indianmoths

It started less than a year back. While exploring for a suitable framework for collecting biodiversity records stumbled upon iNaturalist. (Thanks to Dr. Carol Spencer and Dr. Michelle Koo for a quick hands on session). We initiated IndianMoths project on iNaturalist and started posting our Moth observations there. Soon we had more members joined in and Dr. Roger Kendrick (hkmoths) was very active helping us get the identities and also posted his moth observations from India. 

iNaturalist has some nice features like identifying the photos at various taxonomic levels one is comfortable with i.e. if the photo does not show all the characters to confirm a species, we can always link it up to Genus level or tribe level. Another benefit of contributing to iNaturalist is the data upon peer review,  is shared in GBIF data portal to a wider scientific community. 

With the true spirit of DiversityIndia which is not only for India and Indian sub continent, Nuwan Chathuranga joined in a contributed a lot of records to the project from Sri Lanka. He has also been helping members with the identifications. Other member who contributed to this are Alok who gave the project a big jump start. Dr. Vijay Anand, RohitMG, chiefredearth have been contributing steadily. 

As of now with just 10 members we have more than 1000 records and there is no sign of slowing down. 

Now let us do some simple math, we have combined membership of about 1000 on our groups on Yahoo, Fb and Google+. Even if 10% members (about 100) start regularly contributing records, we could very quickly reach 10000 records mark, which will be really useful data source for further analysis. And the current 10 members have shown us the way and proved that this can be done. Shall we start with a modest target of 5000 records by end of this year ? We are already 20% done and we have a big group to collaborate. 

If you are on India Biodiversity Postal you may like to contribute to IndianMoths Group there too. And we are also participating in National Moth Week (NMW) which would give us more opportunities to collect data and collaborate.

Let us hit 5000 records mark !!!

View more observations from IndianMoths on iNaturalist.org »