Diario de tlr06754

I can’t wait for this year’s iNaturalist City Nature Challenge!

This will be my third year participating in the Denver/Boulder area, and fourth year overall. The goal I set the first year, 500 observations in 4 days, has eluded me so far (476 in 2018, then significantly less in 2019 and 2020, but this is a new year!).

Why am I so excited? When all the dust settled after I submitted my 2020 observations, I sat back and compared them to what I had seen in 2019. I’d had a cold in 2019, which limited me to making observations in the areas where I walked my dog, then in 2020, well, the pandemic held me to the same approximate area, essentially walking distance from my apartment, so the two years are pretty comparable with respect to the areas I covered. And while the challenge occurs on the same long weekend every year, spring didn’t get the memo in 2020. As a result, there were way fewer ID-able plant species out there compared to the previous year. That said, the lack of plants in bloom made me look harder for other observations and I found some super-interesting insects.

This is my 3rd spring in Colorado and I’m dying to see which of those two years experienced a “normal” spring by comparing to this year’s results. Geeky? Perhaps. Interesting and fun? Absolutely!

After I complete this year’s challenge, or maybe leading up to it, I plan download some weather data (temps, snowfall, etc.) and see if I can find the trigger for early or late spring. Is temperature or water availability the trigger for things to grow and blossom? (oh! Maybe I should download it now and try to predict what I’ll see next month…) At any rate, while 3 years of my non-scientific data collection is not going to lead to any world-changing conclusions, it will get me closer to the world around me and help me understand my own micro-environment that much better. Who knows where it will lead me next?!