Happy first day of 2017!  And a big WOW on all the effort to beat the ETC.   Just now, your effort helped to get Pinned Specimen_Tiger Beetles 3 done. Finished.  That one had an 8 day ETC on Dec. 30th, so you beat the ETC by 6 days!

Now there are just 2 expeditions near-complete left, Herbarium_Arkansas Dendrology: Part 8: Hickories and Walnuts (ETC 3 Days) and Magnified_The Killer Within: Wasps, but not as you know them (ETC 14 days).  Both are getting done (slightly) faster than the ETCs we posted on Dec. 30th, so that is great – but lets just how much faster!

Update as 7pm Jan. 1:  Herbarium_Arkansas Dendrology: Part 8: Hickories and Walnuts just FINISHED – you beat the ETC by 3 days and took it to another level with 168 transcriptions in the last 24 hours.

Quick update!  In just 20 hours, you guys finished the Aquatics Aquatic Insects of the Southeastern United States expedition, which had a 3-day estimated time to completion (ETC).  That is WAY ahead of schedule!

However, two others that had ETCs of 8 and 5 days (Pinned Specimen_Tiger Beetles 3 and Herbarium_Arkansas Dendrology: Part 8: Hickories and Walnuts, respectively) yesterday, now show 9 and 6 days ETC – yes, they appear to be backsliding.  We bet that this change is more a hiccup in how ETC is calculated, but we’ll check back again and send in reports over the next couple days.

Thanks again for all the effort!

Hi everyone, and Happy Almost New Year from everyone at Notes from Nature.  Its been a great year for NFN (bucking, perhaps, the overall trend), with our re-launch, WeDigBio and lots of great activity on the site . And we are excited about some new features coming in 2017.  In the interim, we have been trying to finish a few more expeditions off before we launch some new ones.

Below are the expeditions that are nearly finished and the ETC (estimated time to completion) — we are hoping to be able to beat those ETCs if you can help out.  Lets see by how much we can beat them.  We’ll report the outcome here soon (we hope!)  You can check how you are doing to help get there by checking our handy-dandy and now less cluttered stats page: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/notes-from-nature/stats.

Aquatics_Aquatic Insects of the Southeastern United States
ETC* 3 days

Herbarium_Arkansas Dendrology: Part 8: Hickories
ETC* 5 days

Pinned Specimen_Tiger Beetles 3
ETC* 8 days

Magnified_The Killer Within: Wasps, but not as you know them
ETC* 19 days

Many of you participated in WeDigBio 2016 on the Notes from Nature platform. It is an exciting yearly event that continues to grow worldwide. The main organizers of the event just posted their own summary that we wanted to share with the Notes from Nature community.

Check it out here: https://www.idigbio.org/content/wedigbio-2016-0

A couple weeks ago, we asked our Notes from Nature citizen scientists for help completing 5 near-done expeditions.  As of last week, we completed this challenge, and we want to thank all the efforts by some dedicated folks to get us there.   We learned a lot with this challenge — the biggest lesson being that people really enjoyed tackling a challenge.  We also know now to give folks a little more time than 24 hours, especially given that some expeditions still had a fair number of transcriptions to do (and took longest to finish). We hope to find some ways to make “expedition finishers” further rewarded in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned!

A couple more quick Notes from Nature updates as we sail into 2017:

1. We have new “About” pages!  For volunteers, the exciting part is “The Team” page where we list all our researchers and collaborators.  We hope to better organize this down the road and link people to the different expeditions, but it’s a start.
2. Zooniverse had a small glitch with their stats and we didn’t have any Notes from Nature stats for the time period between Dec. 6th and 10th.  Those may be recoverable, but for now you will notice a gap in stats reporting those days.

We appreciate the help, as always, and happy winter holidays to all.

A big thank you is owed to all the citizen scientists who contributed to the just-completed transcription of swallowtail butterfly specimens from the Field Museum of Natural History! This expedition fills in some much-needed taxonomic gaps that remained after the previous expedition, and helps push the swallowtail project forward. Despite the American Thanksgiving weekend, we still managed to get 121 specimens transcribed in 10 days. Way to go!

We have another big push to digitize swallowtail specimens from the eastern United States coming up before the next round of holidays. If you need a break from the festivities, be sure to check back for more butterflies!

Hi everyone, we are just about finished with 5 expeditions and we wanted to see if we could make a big push to get these done!  The total number of transcriptions needed varies from 8 needed to 321.   So, the challenge is:  Can we get these 5 expeditions done in the next 24 hours?  Let’s find out!  You’ll find the expedition names and number needed below.  Just hit the link to start transcribing.  And thanks for being a finisher!

Herbarium_Arkansas Dendrology: Part 6: White Oaks – 8 more transcriptions to do

Butterfly_New World Swallowtail Butterflies from the Field Museum of Natural History – 24 more transcriptions needed

Herbarium_WeDigFLPlants’ Sunflowers of Florida—Florida’s Biggest Plant Family – 129 transcriptions left

Herbarium_Plants of Texas: milkweeds and spurges and birches, oh my! – 182 transcriptions to go

Herbarium_Arkansas Dendrology: Part 5: Blackberries, cherries, hawthorns, buckthorns, elms, hackberries, and mulberries — 24 October 2016 – 321 transcriptions still to do

The New World Swallowtail Butterfly project has a new expedition up! As you may remember, I am collecting images of swallowtail butterfly specimens to understand how morphological diversity varies across the New World. Museum specimens provide an excellent record of diversity through time and across geography, and the new expedition is no exception.

These butterflies were imaged during my recent trip to the Field Museum of Natural History. The Field Museum Division of Insects houses over 12 million specimens; their Butterfly and Moth collection has a geographic and taxonomic breadth that complements the previous expedition nicely. In addition to helping with my research, the data you transcribe will be sent back to the Field Museum to incorporate into their specimen database for other researchers to use in the future.

As with the previous Swallowtail expedition, remember that there are two images for each specimen—a front and a back. This is important, because in some cases, the labels in the image have different data written on each side. Thanks for your help, and look closely—some of these specimens provide a unique historical record of biodiversity that has since been lost!

Hannah L. Owens, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Associate, Florida Museum of Natural History

A new expedition has been launched on Notes from Nature from the herbarium at Appalachian State University. This expedition contains everyone’s favorite families: Asteraceae and Asclepiadaceae! Look for the title Plants have all the anthers (Pt1) to start transcribing this wonderful collection. As you can tell by the (Pt 1) part of the title that there is more to come. Stay tuned on our herbarium Facebook page and Twitter to see when the next segment of this lovely herbarium is released!