Wasn’t sure where to post this question and thought this may be the place!
I’m curious about user statistics on iNaturalist — like, mean/median observations per user, mean/median identifications, average time on platform… etc.
Does anyone know if this information is available anywhere or if it has even been assessed recently? I couldn’t find much while noodling around, but I am constantly amazed at how little I’m aware of certain aspects of iNat! Thanks all.
I haven’t heard of general summary info being available. I think that some data on # observers and observations and IDers and # identifications is out there. The key takeaway from that is that there are many more observer than IDers and a large proportion of IDs come from a small number of IDers.
You can see some statistics here: https://www.inaturalist.org/stats
but not as detailed as what you’re asking about.
staff could probably get population statistics, but i think the only way regular users can get information like this is to do a random sample. you can approximate this by finding the max user ID and then getting a random number between 1 and that max ID. then get stats for the user, if the user exists. then repeat until you get your desired sample size, and then calculate the population stats.
Thanks for sharing, I’m a goof, I never saw the raw stats page!!
Great point @pisum — I feared that the case, but user stats must be highly taxon-specific… your method is probably the only way to get a meaningful answer, and probably why my question isn’t meant to have a single answer… thank you!!
Thank you for your attention to this also @cthawley !
Available to us stats come up in iNat blog posts - which are not easy to search. However.
And the research articles that are published elsewhere. My favourite stat
This is extremely interesting. Will continue reading. Thank you!!!
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