Wild Coachella Results
Back at the beginning of the Wild Coachella Challenge, we talked about the value of recording a single wild thing in the Coachella Valley during the month of March. In the end, 285 of you did just just that (and more!), making a deeper connection with nature and contributing to our understanding of the unique biodiversity of the desert. And, although it wasn't something I planned for at the start, I hope the Challenge gave you an escape from the events that have transformed our community over the past several weeks.
One of the joys of looking through the project observations is seeing the variety of ways that you found to discover the wildlife of the Coachella Valley, from exploring the streets around your neighborhood, to the far reaches of the wilderness, observing just your plants or animals of choice, or everything in sight. Your individual interests and circumstances added something new and different to our amazing picture of life in the desert. Thank you for being a part of the Challenge!
Now, part of the Challenge is a competition, not just to make an observation, but to make as many observations as possible. So without further ado, and to paraphrase The Simpsons, you are all winners in a sense. But in a more accurate sense, these people are the winners:
It's hard to overstate how completely Elizabeth Ogren Erickson dominated this category. Her 1260 observations account for almost 15 percent of all observations in the Challenge, and more observations than the bottom 225 observers combined. All ten of the top observers finished with more than 200 observations each. Great job!
The stated goal of "bioblitz" style events like the Wild Coachella Challenge is to find as many different species as possible, so it's great to see such a close competition in this category. To put this data in context, in just one month you observed more than 30 percent of the total species that have ever been observed on iNat in the Coachella Valley! Congratulations to Rod Belshee for winning this category with 246 different species observed.
Fun fact: the first observation in the Coachella Valley by date observed is this one, a Coachella Desertsnail, found nowhere else on Earth! This particular snail was observed in 1956 and added to iNat as part of a museum collection. One of the first observations by date added is this one, a ghost flower, made by one of the co-founders of iNat in 2008, not long after the launch of the site.
The Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument spans the entire southern skyline of the Coachella Valley, from the ridge all the way down to the valley floor. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Monument, and to celebrate it has a special place in the Challenge. Even though most of the upper reaches of the Monument, and many of the unique species found only at those higher elevations, were inaccessible due to the closure of the Tram (and the late snowy weather we've been having) together you still found 428 species in the Monument alone! Elizabeth was the winner in this category as well, with 134 different plants and animals.
We have a tie! For our final category, most species observed by a new user, both Sharen Metz and iNat user @halhiker each observed 38 different species in the Coachella Valley, and both created their accounts during the month of March. This is especially amazing considering in context: top observers Elizabeth and Rod observed only twelve and zero species in their first month on iNat, respectively.
As you can see, I haven't managed to match all of the Wild Coachella iNat users with your real names yet. I will contact you separately to try and figure out the last few names, so check your iNat messages!
Thank you again for participating in the first ever Wild Coachella Challenge! Even though the Challenge itself is over, I hope that this will be the beginning of something great, and that you'll continue connecting with nature and discovering the amazing wildlife of our desert together with us - remotely for now, and eventually in person.
Stay well,
Colin Barrows
Friends of the Desert Mountains
PS - Now that the official Challenge is over, I removed all of the restrictions on the iNat project so that every observation during the month of March is now showing, bringing our total to 10,890 observations and 886 species! I want to give special thanks to Susan Forgrave, who was a huge help behind the scenes, helping to identify almost 3,000 of your observations, and still found time to make quite a few observations of her own.
Some of the notable observations in the recently included batch weren't made by a person at all, but by remote trail cameras, posted on the Friends of the Desert Mountains iNat account. These cameras are placed along the Randall Henderson Trail as part of a desert tortoise monitoring project, and they did manage to pick up a tortoise or two during the Challenge, along with some other exciting creatures like this gray fox. Mostly though, they end up taking lots of pictures of squirrels.
