I made a simple chrome extension to add a feature I wanted and I’m sure others may find it very useful. Only works on the main website right now.
See how local your species are. This extension adds Local / Global observation counts and percentage values to iNaturalist species grids. Useful for identifying regionally common or globally rare taxa at a glance.
Due to API limitations, the observation counts for some species are kinda inflated, due to including non-wild observations, so in a way makes the less-cultivated plants stand out more.
In addition, it can only see the top 500 in the species view, this is a website limitation.
Anyways let me know what you think and if you find it useful!
That’s really cool and highlights something that I was investigating a couple weeks ago, how much top observers of a species can skew how ‘local’ or ‘popular’ a species appears to be when you sort by number of observations. Great example that I’m sure anyone in Ohio has noticed is that the majority of the top observed species are dragonflies, which is on account of the work of a handful of people. It’d be interesting if we can sort things to get a better idea of how common something really is or how much the general public interacts with it, number of observers probably being an obvious and easy choice.
Yeah, it’s one of those things that stem from the many biases here. Some people post every single thing they see, or at least, don’t shy away from frequent repeats. Others only do the cool things, some just try for one of each, etc.. Some people have 50% of the observations for a species, because there’s only been like 2 posted here and they saw one. Others have 50% of the observations for a species because they’ve observed it a very respectable 40,000 times over thousands of miles of driving.
I’m glad to see people already finding different ways to get value out of it though.
I’m on a pretty slow computer and I was searching a whole state, and noticed that the actual top % didn’t load in until I caused the page to do a lot more loading by scrolling down and clicking the Percent sort option several times. Not sure if it’s Inat or my computer, probably on my end though.
Love it . I’m about to visit a number of nature reserves in the south of Italy and this gives me an idea of the “special” things I might be able to find. Thanks for your input.
I installed it. From the percentage function, I’m seeing that, for organisms with few global observations, particular areas can comprise a significant percentage of total observations. However, for the other filter functions, I’m having trouble figuring out what they mean. This application could benefit from a brief user manual, or at least clearer filter instructions.
I think that Total sorts by what species in the search area have the most global observations, and Local sorts by what has the most observations in the search area.
“Total” shows the global observations. It saves for a few days to prevent frequent lookups, so it might not be perfectly accurate all the time.
“Local” shows the observation total for that search. It’s named local now, but there’s probably a better term, because it can apply to a lot of searches.
The percentage is just the “local”/“total” as expected.
. I’m about to visit a number of nature reserves in the south of Italy and this gives me an idea of the “special” things I might be able to find. Thanks for your input.