End of Season Update: 2018

Thanks to our many volunteers, we have surpassed 32,000 photo observations on iNaturalist! We owe a lot to our many volunteer photographers and identifiers. Without you, we would only just be getting started surveying Ohio. In comparison, the survey in the 1990’s only had about 30,000 records, including numbers extracted from older publications. In two years, were were able to double a decades worth of work!

For those reading this blog, but not getting the emails, photo and specimen observations are due December 1st of this year. Anything submitted after that might not make it onto next years maps, but we still want your observations regardless of submission date.

Cool records for the year:

Jim Lemon and I published a short note in Argia 30:3 about some weird oddities. A population of Jade Clubtails and Paiute Dancers were found in Ohio. We also had weird errant records of one Scarlet Skimmer and Rambur’s Forktail found at aquatic plants distributors. Lots of other cool things were found this year, so I recommend reading the full article.

This Scarlet Skimmer is our first “non-native” dragon that originates from Asia. A large population is known in Florida, but not many have made it outside of the state so far.