Hi! Is there a way to find how many of the observers in a country are foreign (tourists) or locals? This does not seem to be possible through just the explore page, so was wondering how I can go about this?
I doubt there is a way to easily determine this. iNat does not require users to provide information about where they live – there is no location connected with a profile.
Possibly observing habits might give some clues (e.g. if most of a person’s observations are made in a particular state/city), but this would require analysing each user and their observing patterns individually.
Possibly you could look at the temporal distribution of observations in a particular place. Repeated observations over a longer period would tend to suggest that the observer lives nearby or is a frequent visitor. If all the observations are clustered in a short single period (a week or a month), it is more likely the observer was visiting (or they were a user who signed up, made a handful of observations, and then stopped using iNat).
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Yeah, there is no something you can easily determine for all those reasons cited above.
I think your best bet is to go in the place list and see the observers for that place in particular and see their observing habits, case by case.
This would be very tricky to do… take my case for example. I am german, but few of my observations are actually from Germany… instead they are from Ecuador, Egypt, Colombia… I live/d in all of those places for one year+ … I imagine it would be difficult to just look at my observation map and guess whether and where I have been a tourist and where not
I wonder what you want to know. I will presume you want to know if that observer lives locally? If you are identifying what comes in daily for a particular location - in time you will recognise active locals. You can check their calendar and pick some random dates.
As I in turn notice when a familiar iNat name is visiting Cape Town and I get a sudden batch of their obs in my here and now.
You can also look at leaderboards for local species and plod thru working out - if it is a foreign taxon specialist, or a local one.
I could skim thru this list of penguin observers and tell you who is local, visiting from up-country, or foreign - 3, 16, 18, 22 … are known locals.
(And I still need to drive 5 minutes so I can add my own obs!!
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Presuming again that you are interested in the Maldives?
You would have to pick thru these lists of observers
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/maldives-biological-survey?tab=observers
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/maldives click people
why do you want to know this?
It’s done before with the world tour. Then I was wondering how it was determined.
And I’ve asked myself the same question
I had the same question when I was trying to set up the CNC for my heavily touristy area. I wanted to know who to reach out to inform.
There wasn’t a great way to accomplish that task. I ended up going through the list of top observers and looking at individual profiles and patterns of observations.
Having IDed for the area for a while, I know the higher volume regulars, but it is hard to pick out a new local showing interest from the tourists.
Edited: removed repeated statement
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Given the nature of the data iNat collects, I doubt there’s a statistically sound way to determine this. The closest you could get, as mentioned, is probably seeing whether someone has observations in a given place over a long time period versus a short one; this is presumably what was done when these statistics were presented in the past? And it can certainly be used to venture reasonable guesses about individual observers. But those are still guesses; are many reasons that information can’t be used to firmly predict residency, nationality, or even just future observation patterns.
And then there’s the further question of what it even means for someone to be “foreign” versus “local.” People migrate to new cities/countries all the time, for all sorts of reasons, at varying frequencies. Some people split their time between multiple localities for work or family reasons. Binaries like “foreign versus local” become increasingly unhelpful as you try to get a finer-grained picture of reality; not to mention that that framework can set the stage for hostile interactions.
If you’re interested in something to do with data collection, I’d suggest refining your investigation to the more precise factors that directly influence whatever question you’re asking, and to consider the scope of data iNaturalist actually holds.
You could probably compute how many observers in X country have observations that fall within a single N-day period and also had observations both before and after that period in other countries, for example; but you won’t really know how many of those are tourists, how many are people who moved multiple times, how many were there for work (and thus maybe aren’t a direct result of the tourism industry), how many are locals who infrequently use iNat both at home and abroad, how many are infrequent iNat users who live in immediately adjacent territories (how foreign are they if they live 20 minutes away, and there’s just a border in between?), etc.
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