Guess your location - an iNaturalist memory game

Do you cover a lot of ground with iNaturalist? Here’s a fun way to review your past adventures and exercise your biodiversity brain, while you take a break from all that identifying.
On the iNat website, use the dropdown menu under your account icon to choose “Calendar.”
Click on some date that has a lot of observations. This will return a grid view of that day. Quickly scroll down a bit so that you can’t see the top part of the panel that says where you were that day. Then try to guess the location based on what you oberved. Enjoy the replay of your hike!

8 Likes

I play that memory game. Thanks for the tip! Sometimes I’ll make observations on my phone periodically & extrapolate locations from there.

2 Likes

Sometimes, I have to play this in reverse when my system of recording locations on a day of cycling and finding plants breaks down: “Damn, I don’t have a phone photo for that. But Strava says I stopped for 8 minutes just this side of the creek…”

3 Likes

That wouldn’t work well for me. I have a photographic memory in the literal sense of the word. If I see any of the about 100,000 images in my archive (going back about 25 years), I can remember the location where I took the shot within a few hundred yards. The same happens if I think about a particular species of organism. Just referring to the name, brings up a mental picture of, at least, the first place I found it and photographed it. Just wish my memory worked this well for all the other less “photographic” things in life, like remembering what I needed to buy at the shops.

6 Likes

I relate to this too well. I remember iNat stuff too well and then boom, studies :face_with_bags_under_eyes:

3 Likes

I use the calendar all the time and sometimes related to memory. I will often use it to see if I have already shared a particular individual photo or those from a particular dated folder in my computer. I do this to keep from duplicating entries. I’m not sure if it is a poor memory thing or that I just have so much that it is hard to remember them all. Also I keep folders on various categories of nature like plants, mammals, herps… I have done this since before using iNat on a regular basis so some of those folders contain items that have not been positively ided. I use the calendar to see why. For example have I not posted it yet or has the id not reached research grade. If it hasn’t reached research grade I will often reach out and ask some one in the leader boards to take a look. When an entry does reach research grade I update the item in it’s folder.

2 Likes