The Great Yardening

  Hey everyone! I wanted to have a nice dive into Sewellia as I will soon be getting 5 specimens myself for my River Aquarium. Specifically, I will be getting Sewellia lineolata. These fish are perhaps my favorite freshwater species of fish. They occupy high flow and highly oxygenated streams and rivers, and have a very distinct body adapted for high flow, sometimes as high as 2 meters a second or around 6.6 feet. Of the 13 species described, unfortunately the majority are either either threatened or endangered, as is common place with many of the desired species for the aquarium hobby. Image courtesy of (Shrimpy Business) until I can get my own! I have grown a great appreciation for taxonomy and phylogeny through this video series ! Impossible to absorb in a single listen, but great background material! Kingdom Animalia 1.5 million living animal species. Phylum Chordata ~half of the species within Chordata are ra...

  Hey Everyone! I wanted to talk a little bit more about our identification app 'Picture this'. Specifically, the litany of tools it provides.  Picture : Based on a single picture, the app is able to ascertain a great deal of plant species. 360 Identify : Utilizing front, side, and side viewing angles you can more accurately ascertain the identification of a plant species. Weed ID : Utilizing front, side, and side ascertain the kind of 'weed' you have in your garden. Toxic ID: Same as above Tree ID : Take multiple pictures of a tree to identify its strain. Specifically branches and leaves, close up image of bark in detail, and a full tree image for identification.  Bird ID : Capture of a picture of a bird to have the app identify it for you. Insect ID : Capture a picture of an insect to have the app identify it for you.  Allergen ID : Capture a 360 image of a plant and determine what kind of allergen's it produces. Diagnose : Utilizing full plant capture, affected p...

  Hello Everyone! It has come to my attention that fungi might be the most difficult creature to catalogue as I am only easily aware of their 'fruiting' bodies. Followed by animals whose visages are much to fast for me to capture, especially without taking samples. However, I do have a number a new plant species and a single mushroom who I am still working to identify. I do want to say, the image hosting on this site is abysmal, though I imagine it is because of size constraints on unpaid accounts. That being said the amount of invasives picked up in this foray were much higher than in the previous species identification. Moving forwards I have decided to fully subscribe to Picture This as it has proven itself the most capable of the photo identification software. 

  Hey Everyone! So, climate is a bit of an issue, especially in Florida. This year marks the worst lightning storms I have ever experienced on property. Bolts loud enough to cause actual hearing damage even. This is all occurring in a time of massive drought within the state as well. While fortunate as I can explore the wetlands and document life under the cypress canopy, I can't exactly call it good for the resident wildlife.  These reasons, among many others, are more than enough to warrant careful documentation and respect. I did find a few sites of interest that could help me monitor and track various factors, aswell as a few media options to utilize them. Weather Underground is a pretty awesome network of remote weather sensors that is basically entirely community organized. Similar to Bird Weather and their remote stations, they have a litany of interesting data to sift through for regions all across the globe! What a fantastic forecast! This means I can enjoy Florida f...

 Hey everyone! This just about summarizes the properties soil distribution, granted it's a little out of date, despite data sets being from last year. The last time the area was sampled was ~10-16 years ago, not that it would change that much. This site though is super nifty, and I can see how it'd be a great tool for assisting with construction and planning. Interestingly, some of the lines put on the map for soil delineation may have been used by our insurance to try to get flood insurance out of us, despite us having no flooding issues, even in some of the worst hurricanes, storms, and weather events, which have since been disputed and withdrawn. We had been considering adopting one of our state's keystone animals, the gopher tortoise, but looking at the chart now, it seems we don't exactly have the best place for them to setup, despite the presence of other burrowing creatures.

Hey everyone! I did some digging and got a few documents older than I am!  These documents contain a bunch of information about the house and the property before the house was on it. As it was originally purchased as a parcel instead of a prebuilt home, sampling was conducted to ascertain what kind of foundation was needed.  Despite the many methods of importing the image, the quality still remains questionable, however we can gleam some important details. Namely that the majority of the sites sampled, all around the base corners of the house, are almost entirely full of various fine sands and silty sands. Additionally, peat was present, despite limited records of how far the wetlands extended post appraisal. 

 Hello Everyone! So, you know, it was a very bright idea to aspire to do this in the Florida heat, in the midst of a very hot summer. Despite that, I have transferred the data points into a google sheet document. That being said, when I import said GPS coordinates from the handy Field Map App, by scribing them painstakingly entry after entry, I either end up with a set of coordinates that are splayed around Nepal, or coordinates splayed around Svalbard. I have no doubt, that both of these places have their virtues, but they are certainly nowhere near my property! 28.61329, -81.23499 are the coordinates listed for the center of my house on my property.  28.613163, 81.234905 are the coordinates for a single plot in my system. Thankfully, this seems to be an easy fix, it seems that the coordinates within the app I was recording, do not record negative versus positive values. Honestly kind of shocking considering the app has ARC GIS integration. So, within the Sheets document, I w...

Hey Everyone! As we have talked about previously, we have a pretty solid way of identifying plant and animal occurrences within the landscape. Unfortunately, we do not have such accurate pinpoint measurements in terms of collecting geospatial data. Fortunately, we do have overhead maps. The overhead maps we will utilize first will be google mymaps. We will use an 'expedition' based methodology and will go on scavenger hunts for the specific organism we are trying to catalogue. I understand this will not be the most efficient method, but it will get good information on the area. The species we have catalogued so far have been the ones easiest to identify. Once we fill the map with markers of each species, we will then go in and search for species yet to be tagged.  + Animals will be the trickiest for us to catalogue, as there are camera devices setup, but many are unreliable for animal identification, especially of the smaller variety. Animals will not be plotting as pinpoints, ...