Cincinnati Re-Wild - Backyard Ecological Restoration Umbrella's Journal

It's been almost a year since the formation of the Cincinnati Re-Wild Umbrella. In this first year, we have together documented a total of 869 insect species relying on our plantings. This is truly amazing given the fact that most of our projects are on relatively small fragments of land. Spectacular job people!

Here's a slideshow showing all the insects observed within the umbrella...
https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_observation_slideshow.html?project_id=cincinnati-re-wild-backyard-ecological-restoration-umbrella&per_page=869&pages=1&taxon_id=47158

This second slideshow compiles a variety of data in different ways (it takes a little while to get going... be patient)...
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/cincinnati-re-wild-backyard-ecological-restoration-umbrella/stats_slideshow

You can plug your own project name in place of the umbrella to see only images from your own projects. The taxon-id in the first one can also be changed to page through your favorite taxa from your own project.

The first slideshow is part of a github repository developed by someone else. The files in this github repository query the public iNat api's to retrieve and model data. Although I have a background in information technology, I have no first hand experience with github. Instead of starting from scratch, it would be much easier to create a free github account, pull in this same library as a starting point, and modify one of these to suit your particular needs. I tried experimenting with it and was able to modify one of the files and see the modified results. I left systems development in the early 2000s with no regrets, but if anyone wants to copy and modify this code to meet their own needs... go crazy!
https://github.com/jumear/stirfry/tree/master

Shout out to @mwhitson for rattling the cage and suggesting I look at some of these slideshows and the software used in creating them. Thank you everyone for being part of this. ~ @stockslager

Observations of species within the umbrella with fewer than 250 total observations. Please go and look at my github repo. It's utterly embarrassing. I don't even know how to delete from github. But... I tried. And it DOES show how planting natives attracts species not often observed. I hacked someone else's code. I was afraid to try to make it pause and hit the server over and over so you have to page through 4 pages that are unequal lengths. Not exactly elegant, but whatever...

https://stockslager.github.io/iNat/species_count.html?project_id=cincinnati-re-wild-backyard-ecological-restoration-umbrella

The first step in the Systems Development Life Cycle is the gathering of requirements. This can be difficult at large organizations like this umbrella. It involves identifying subject matter experts who can clearly state what data they would like extracted from the database and modeled in a way that's easy to read. It's also difficult because it's important to manage expectations. In our case, we are prepared to offer our developer zero dollars. This means that our requirements should be fairly simple. Example...

Observations of wild and naturally occurring species within the umbrella with fewer than 250 total observations.

We also need to make sure that we collaborate carefully. This means polling the group of subject matter experts to see if there are other queries that might be more meaningful. What other queries would people find interesting? Since we are only prepared to pay our developer zero dollars, we should probably limit ourselves to retrieval of data stored by the member projects within our own umbrella. This will make things easier for the developer because it limits the number of records they'll need to manipulate.