Calling all Ode Enthusiastists.

The Odolympics starts in June!

The Dragonfly Society of the Americas, Sociedad de Odonatología Latinoamericana and Odonata Central are partnering to conduct the Odolympics 2021.

Highlights

• Odonate survey of the entire Western Hemisphere
• Everyone can participate by entering observations into Odonata Central or iNaturalist
• June and December Survey dates to accommodate participants in the entire Western Hemisphere
• The goal is to record as many species from as many places as possible
• You can have fun and contribute to citizen science by helping to create a single year snapshot of odonate distribution

Details

Everyone can participate. The goal is to try to record as many species from as many places in the Western Hemisphere as possible in the two census periods to generate a snapshot of odonate distribution.

Dates: 19-27 June 2021 and 11-19 December 2021.

The final repository for the data will be Odonata Central. These data will be critical in filling gaps in the Odonata Central data set. All data on Odonata Central are freely available to everyone to explore or download.

Help make this project a success. Plan to participate.

How to Contribute

Overview: Submit your odonate observations to Odonata Central or join the iNaturalist projects. Enter observations on as many days of the Odolympics as you wish.

All Odolympics participants must be registered users of Odonata Central, even if you plan to join the iNaturalist projects. Registration is free and takes only a few minutes.

If you are planning to join the iNaturalist projects, you only have to regsiter on Odonata Central once. However, you must add your iNatualist ID to your account. (After registering and/or logging in, click the blue My Account button in the top menu.) This ensures your iNat observations will be added to an Odonata Central account when the iNaturalist project spreadsheet is imported. If you do not do this, your iNatualist observations cannot be counted toward the Odolympics total.

There are three ways you can enter observations for the Odolympics

Options 1 and 2 are for users of Odonata Central. Option 3 is really only for people who only use iNatualist.

1. Directly into Odonata Central. We encourage participants to enter data directly into Odonata Central. Odonata Central accepts complete checklists of photographed, collected and observed only records for any location and tracks abundance data.
2. Imported into Odonata Central from iNaturalist. This is the preferred way to get iNaturalist observations into Odonata Central. You can enter observations into iNaturalist and then import them into your Odonata Central account by cutting and pasting the URL of the iNaturalist record. This copies location, date, species, and photographs into Odonata Central so they don’t need to be entered again. See this video tutorial.
3. Joining the iNaturalist Projects. If you prefer to just use iNaturalist alone, you can join one or both of the projects called Odolympics June 2021 or Odolympics December 2021. Observations reported to iNaturalist by project members during the Odolympics will be automatically collected into these projects. To avoid duplication, do not import these records yourself into Odonata Central. Note that iNaturalist does not track abundance data nor does it allow records of exuviae. It also often obscures coordinates in reports, but you should give us permission to access accurate coordinates when you register.

How to make sure your observations are counted in the Odolympics totals

1. If using Method 1 or 2 above. On the first screen of Add Records in Odonata Central, be sure to select Odolympics from the drop down list as the project for each checklist you enter. The Odolympics project is only available in the drop down list AFTER you enter a date of observation that falls during the Odolympics.
2. If using Method 3. Be sure you are a registered user of Odonata Central and have provided your iNaturalist user name in your Odonata Central account.

Results

A summary of results and participation will be published in Argia (the newsletter of the Dragonfly Society of the Americas) in 2022.

At any time, users can view the Odolympics data in Odonata Central by opening the filters and setting the Project filter to “Odolympics” for records, species lists or maps. Records contributed to iNaturalist can be viewed by visiting the Odolympics iNaturalist Project. After the iNatualist data are imported into Odonata Central, the aggregate data can be viewed there.

Questions?

Use the Support link in the footer below to email any questions.