Number crunching - what 1000 species might look like

As I approach the end of January with a revised target of >200 by end of the month I sat down and played through the numbers to see what sort of effort would be required to really see this thing through. I have a rough idea of where I'd like to be at the end of each quarter and what the make up of the final list might look like. Will be interesting to see how far off it turns out to be. Targets of course can be revised as time moves along and maybe some groups will do better and others worse than expected. I'll adjust accordingly and target to suit the situation. One thing is sure though - it will require a lot of different techniques to get the job done. I should get the first pitfalls in place by the weekend probably!

Here's a finger-in-the-air estimate of where this is going:

Class	Current	2017-tgt	%age
Vert - Birds	32	110	29
Vert - Other	1	9	11
Lepidoptera	1	150	0
Diptera	4	125	3
Arachnida	4	61	6
Coleoptera	3	100	3
Invert - Other	26	104	25
Plants - Vascular	36	120	30
Plants - Bryo	11	40	27
Fungi	24	150	16
Lichens	29	55	52
Other	7	11	63
	178	1035	17

Edit: some browsing of previous year's totals when this wasn't being attempted. So ballpark I "normally" record about 1000 spp. in a year which I think is encouraging. In 2016 I deliberately focussed on new species and so didn't record many common species I saw.

NT1887, Cullaloe LNR
2015: 773 spp.
2016: 652 spp.

Year totals iRecord - all sites
2015: 1138 spp.
2016: 961 spp.