I like the concept, but I feel it needs a parameter for including endemics. If it included maybe 3 endemic species to a state, that would make it much more manageable.
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This is very neat!! I think my main suggestion would be to set fixed taxa to pick from â lets say, each round shows 5 vertebrates, 5 arthropods, 5 plants, 5 fungi, etc⌠As is I was surprised how well-balanced most rounds were, with the exception of a few moth-only rounds. An option to pick which taxa are shown would be nice as well.
@neutral: Username language is a huge cue, and one of the rounds was full of photos from the user âappalachianwondererâ. Needless to say the observations were from the Appalachian mountains.
Maybe credits could be obscured until a guess has been made?
Seconding this. Maybe a post-guess page that shows credits and links to the observations would be better.
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I played about 25 rounds and itâs a lot of fun! Even though I basically had to guess whenever there werenât any plants in the photos. Most of the time, the best I could do is get it to the correct half of the US (the locations are very US-biased). My best was 33 km where I got very lucky.
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Iâve noticed a small problem. When the cursor is hovering over the correct location, it changes from a hand for scrolling on the map to a pointer for clicking, which ruins some of the surprise and makes it very easy to cheat by moving the cursor around until it changes.
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Neat game! I also think having each round show a diversity of taxa would be good. Other wishlist items:
- Give me an average score so I can see how well Iâm doing overall
- Move the Next Challenge button further upâhaving it under the rounds means that if you play several times in a row you have to start scrolling down to click it every time, which breaks the flow.
- Maybe after making a guess, allow us to click on the photos to go to the associated observation? Would love to be able to investigate some of these taxa.
Wow, Iâm truly aweful at this! - mainly because I canât tell the difference between North America and Australia⌠at least I knew they werenât Europe!
Round 1: 526km
Round 2: 14828km
Round 3: 1535km
Round 4: 257km
Round 5: 16433km
Round 6: 15826km
Round 7: 14526km
Round 8: 17227km
Round 9: 1701km
Round 10: 5755km
Round 11: 1275km
(At least round 4 had a drone fly in it!)
Very cool idea
I agree with most of the suggestions above - especially having an average. It would be interesting to have an option to limit the taxa - Iâd be much better at SyrphidguessrâŚ
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plant blind 
Will try - but the sample set up top - feels as if it is almost all in my âhereâ
If that second one is our otter? Then only the daisy is a maybe.
Okay - got one at 300km. And two way off at 13K km!
I like this! One thing I seemed to notice is that it shows non-native species, for example in one I saw several European plant species but the location was in the US. Maybe best to only include native species? Or maybe to take this a step further, find a way to filter out species with a large distribution. E.g. Lamium purpureum or Prunella vulgaris will grow in every place on the planet, every continent and every small island, so they canât really be used to guess location.
Also, not sure anything can be done about this, but one time half of the pictures were just ticks, which I found gross (but helped my correctly guess new york, haha).
I think that this is a super neat game! my best one so far is 332km from the original destination.
I agree with both of these, I had a few that were similar.
It is still a prototype, and I think it is really fun!
Really neat idea. It would be helpful to have an easy and hard mode with scientific/common names given and just photos. Also, mine were very biased towards Australia and Russia even though that is not where the bulk of Inats observations are.
This is quite fun, albeit Iâm only really guessing the continent. Getting more accurate guesses would be so hard I imagine!
I feel like there should be a taxa selector, like what iNat has with âPlantsâ âBirdsâ âMammalsâ etc. I feel that would give a bit of an easier time depending on peopleâs specialties (However, mammals are dead giveaways sometimes.)
If multiple taxa are selected, an equal distribution of them is a better thing to have rather than have all plants, for example, when your not a plant person.
In general, the things many others have been saying I also agreed with.
As many others, I found this quite fun! I definitely agree that ensuring thereâs a bit of variety would be helpful, as well as excluding wide-ranging species, especially invasive/exotic species. One of the sets I got included a feral pigeon which narrowed it down to⌠pretty much every city on the planet. luckily the other photos in the set were more helpful!
Another thing that could be interesting to include if possible would be having a few more ways of measuring the accuracy/precision of the guesses. For example, I noticed that I often was at the right latitude but in the wrong continent/country⌠or the right country but the wrong region of it (especially in larger countries like Australia, the USA, and Russia).
Love this! Such a fun idea. The first example I got had a decent variety of observations, with some sedges, flowering plants, a Spruce Grouse⌠:)
One of mine had Ghost Pipes, Mitchella repens, and Pink-lady Slipper on it, which would assure Eastern US. However, it stated it was Western Australia.
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I actually did pretty well overall for taxa in the Americas or Europe, but one observation in NZ was showing all invasive species so I thought it was in the USA, and I was terrible at tropical Asia/tropical Africa (obviously, no charismatic mammals were in the images I saw).
Does anyone else here get annoyed when movies are shown that are set in one place but the bird sounds are from somewhere else entirely, and the plants are from somewhere else, too (not even necessarily the same place)?
And >5000km you get a beaver, because youâre way offâŚ
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My first round included four camera-trap pictures of the same species. It could definitely be improved by not including multiple photos of the same species. And I agree with others who suggest deliberately balancing the organism types to some extent. Overall, very fun and addictive!
My sixth round was at the same location as my first round, and included a number of the same photos. I nailed it! 
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Impressive!
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