A more easily-accessible and 'fun' user stats/'achievements' page/section

The goal of iNat, in general terms, is to help engage people with nature. Personally, I’ve always loved looking at my stats and achievements for, well pretty much anything. I’m the kind of person who logs every book i read and movie I watch so i can ask questions like ‘What is the least popular book i read this year, what is the oldest movie i have seen?’ and so on.

I know iNaturalist keeps a lot of this data, but sometimes it is hidden. So, I propose a page/section on the user-profile that displays a users stats, achivements, and in general cool things they have done.

For example, What is the rarest species I have seen on iNat? How many other people have seen it? If I was the first person to observe X within a particular country that could be displayed.

There are potentially hundreds of these neat little stats that could be displayed, so maybe a user could have the option to pick, say, 5 questions that then get displayed on their profile. For example, I might select ‘Rarest Observation’, which displays the obs. i have that is the rarest, ‘Native Bees’, showing the % of bees native to my most-active (or selected) region I’ve seen, ‘Favourite Observation’, which is one I could select, ‘Aberrant observation’, a species I have observed outside of it’s usual range, ‘Largest Animal’, showing the animal i have observed with the largest average weight.

I guess I can’t really talk for other people, but I’m the kind of person who loves looking back at this sort of data, and I’m probably not the only one.

I would love to browse such stats. I enjoyed looking at the my personal statistical year review that INat made available last month, which effectively covered my entire INat experience as I only joined in 2019.

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Welcome to the forum, @abdullateefismail!

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You can also use the statistics page for this year (2020) too, although it obviously will only have a little bit of data as we’re 10 days in.

https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2020

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Not only will it be fun, but it’s a great way to incentive tourism. I was just thinking about it today so I’m adding my idea to the thread. You could have achievements per country, as well as global. For the case of Peru, for example, we have a set of protected wildlife in our coins, so “Observe all the wildlife of X set” could be an achievement, which would incentive locals and tourists to travel to areas where tourism is not too high for this achievement.

If I’ve learned something from videogame achievements, is that people will spend a lot of time and resources to get a badge that seems pointless, but it gives personal satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment. “Visit 5 protected areas”, “Observe X species of X genus”… Those are more advanced, but some easier to achieve would be “observe 10, 20, 30, 50, 100… species” or “observe X endemic species”.

iNat could also collaborate with tourism companies, which could offer specialized iNat tours. Here in Peru, if you look at the map, (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=7513) there are a lot of unexplored/unserexplored areas, and even national parks or other protected areas, which could use more tourism.

This seems somewhat similar to some existing closed feature requests:

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I’d be for adding some interesting stats to the profile page, but that will have to wait until it’s redesigned, which likely won’t happen in the near future since revamps of notifications, subscriptions, and other parts of the site would probably take priority.

Also, I’m not a developer, but I think something like could be made by a third party using our API. This little streak finder is pretty fun, for instance.

As someone who’s spent a lot of time doing exactly that when playing a video game, I understand its motivational power (so many hours playing Fallout). However, as I said before (which @bouteloua quoted), our hope is that people find using iNat and exploring nature to be intrinsically motivating. There are also some downsides to competitiveness when it comes to iNatting, such as creating false observations, trespassing, trampling habitat, bad blood between users, etc.

I’m going to close this request because it will be some time until we start working on a new profile page.

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