Pending Results and Maps from the Blogger Bioblitz

We are still "in the lab" so to speak with the final results of the Blogger Bioblitz. All of the data crunchers and digital cartographers are involved in academia in one way or another and this is crunch time. So, stay tuned and we'll have the final tabulation in the next week or so.

In the meantime, Jenn has shared some impressive preliminary results of plants, fungi and mosses at the Google Group. You can read them below the fold.

Here is some metadata from our compiled BioBlitz records. This only includes data mailed out to us as of 5/5/07, and only includes plants, algae, mosses, fungi, lichens and such (verts and inverts will come later from other team members). Please note this is preliminary data, still being subject to data checking, and as such is subject to a standard 5% error rate :-).

Total number of records: 640 (includes many duplicate species)

Top number of records submitted, by blogger: 227 (Wayne at Niches, Georgia), followed by 209 (Kathie Hodge at the Cornell Mushroom Blog, New York)

Countries: USA (87%), Canada (13%)

States and Provinces represented, ordered by % records:

Georgia 35%
New York 35%
British Columbia 10%
California 7%
Utah 5%
Ontario 3%
Massachusetts 3%
Maryland 2%

Known Phyla: 11...
Ascomycota Basidiomycota Bryophyta Chlorophyta Coniferophyta Equisetophyta Hepatophyta Lycopodiophyta Magnoliophyta Pteridophyta Zygomycota

Top Phyla: Magnoliophyta (flowering plants), with a whopping 448 records, followed by Bryophyta (mosses) with 70 records

Known Classes: 18

Top Classes: Magnoliopsida (Dicots), with 372 records, followed by Liliopsida (Monocots) with 73 records.

Known Orders (sorry, too lazy to break this down by Phylum or Class right now, so it's not that useful): 91

Top Orders: Asterales (Composites etc.) with 52 records, followed by Rosales
(Roses etc.) with 44 records (Note that "records" means this includes multiple entries for the same
species)

Some other tidbits:
- 164 known Families (Asteraceae was #1)
- 344 known Genera (give or take a few questionables)
- The most commonly recorded Ascomycota families were lichenized
(Cladoniaceae and Parmeliaceae) - wonder if there will be some arguing over
that taxonomy?
- Dryopteridaceae was the most commonly recorded fern family
- The most common moss family was Dicranaceae. There are also several other
moss records that are only labeled to class (Bryopsida)

The most commonly recorded species, creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens),
is listed 4 times in 3 regions by four different bloggers. Several other
flowering plants were recorded 3 times.