e_moon60 (e_moon60) wrote,
e_moon60
e_moon60

Feeling Scientific

The new OdonataCentral site is up--got the news on the TexOdes listserv, and ran over to check the county checklists. Sure enough, no one had yet entered some odes that I have photographs of, for our county.  So I submitted a couple, only to discover that they sized up the shots I sent--which I had resized smaller and then compressed, so the larger versions don't look very good.  I'n proud of some of those images; I didn't want them to look blurry or pixelated.  So I spent a good part of Sunday afternoon and evening and early Monday morning making new crops of the originals, checking dates and IDs, and submitting the rest of my list that they didn't already have.  I still have one to go, because I'm waffling over which picture of the Plateau Spreadwing is most characteristic.

As with the contributions I've made to a national butterfly and moth database, I am delighted to be a contributor to scientific knowledge.  "This bug occurs in this county" may not seem like much, but...to someone studying biogeography and the movement of species, it is.   With climate change already changing the distribution of plants and insects (and in some cases higher taxa, my data could be very useful indeed.

What species are "mine"?   Great Spreadwing, Southern Spreadwing, Halloween Pennant, Common Whitetail, Band-winged Dragonlet,  Twelve-spotted Skimmer.   I'm sure they exist elsewhere in the county; they  just hadn't been submitted/validated before. 


Tags: biodiversity, science databases
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