Instances where America-centrism is busted on iNat?

On iNat, are there instances where the American species (Including partially American, like the Barn owl and Western Honeybee) have less observations than their Eurasian, African, Australian or Oceanian counterparts? Exclude South America, since they are kinda a jumble up, and are equally dominant and will spoil the fun.

I’m asking this because America-centrism is everywhere. In a particularly pathetic case, Sri Lankans do not know about Sunbirds. They are known as Hummingbirds. That’s what I thought at least, even though no Hummingbirds were found on Sri Lankan bird lists (and I knew about Sunbirds) I still believed in Hummingbirds in Asia,. I once put up a hummingbird feeder, which went to the ants. This is because the books we read all call hovering nectar drinking insect eating birds Hummingbirds, since they are the ones found in America where every single book on planet Earth is written (probably a bit of hyperbole here).

So, Belted Kingishers are more observed than Common Kingfishers. Downy woodpeckers are more observed than Great Spotted Woodpeckers. Carolina Carpenter ants are more observed than Asian Weaver Ants (which are actually pretty impressively observed on iNat).

Does anyone have any places where non-North-American species are more observed than any of their American relatives, excluding South America in both categories?

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My reaction when I read the “excluding South America” bit

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I think hummingbird thing comes from tv more than books, e.g. Sphingidae are called hummingbirds everywhere and they’re not even birds, people are just ignorant about some things, and actually big ones do resemble birds at night.
Numbers for European birds are funny btw, somehow rare NA species are more observed than birds you can see almost every day of the year here, they grew this year, but 15k of fieldfares to almost 123k of american robin? And redwings are at 5k!

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Sedge Darner (Aeshna subarctica) has well over 50% of its observations in the Old World.

Subarctic Darner ( Aeshna juncea) is just slightly over 50% of the observations in North America.

Realistically I think though given that roughly 80% of the iNat user base is located in North America, what you are really asking for, or are going to get is species whose distribution covers both the Old and New World, but where the New World range is highly restricted or located in more remote areas.

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The european marten species are actually far more observed than the north american ones:
The stone marten (martes foina) and the pine marten (martes martes) have 1.371 and 809 observations on iNaturalist right now.
Their amercian counterparts, the american marten (martes americana) and the pacific marten (martes caurina) only have 670 and 548.
I was actually surprised when I found out about that and I don’t know the reason why it is that way. Maybe it’s more common here in Europe that martens live near humans, they even have a reputation for breaking into chicken stalls. Or are they just more rare?

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American marten range is almost entirely within Canada (with some distribution in Alaska and northern tier states). It is highly tied to the boreal forest so much of its range is simply Canadian wilderness. Number of American Marten are unquestionably higher than its European counterparts, just to my point above, their distribution does not lend itself to easy observing (I’ve personally ever only seen them along trails in provincial parks, trying to find one in the vast forest would be very time consuming).

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How do you find out they’re more of them? I can’t find any info on american one nor pine/beech ones’ population sizes (sable is also interesting one to count with millions of them killed for fur).

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It’s an assumption based on the hundreds of thousands if not millions of kilometers of forest that their habitat covers in North America. Especially for Stone Marten, their range simply does not have anywhere near the available amount of habitat to support a larger population. M. martes doesn’t seem to extend far enough into Russia to take advantage of the land available there.

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Beech Marten is actually introduced in the US, and there are still no observations of it here.

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Sables have a big one though - thick line one (and it was even bigger) https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/XuPlwehSc8NbQGzlFcU0mww3lWkJQREXN9rNA6bsYW_P8VAvZmB-TC1FayKF898qNiYNCNARHdnCfg3a

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So, do you mean USA or even North America? but what do you mean with “America”?

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Representation of iNat observers by country is heavily skewed towards North America (U.S. and Canada). Any biases in species observation has to take into account the number of observers for a particular area.

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when I was small I also assumed sunbird as hummingbird, but I knowledge myself, And I also thought the common tiger is a monarch, I was surprised when I check there range,

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I’m not super familiar with the biology of Sable, and the original post did not refer to them, but it is my understanding that they maintain quite large territories, leading to a very low population density. Perhaps similar to the North American Fisher, which while not in the genus Martes is another low density, large geographic range mustelid in North America.

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Interesting, thanks for your answer!

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A distressingly high percentage of the European records are also of roadkill or other dead animals, plus a good volume of scat observations which would be even higher were all of them to be properly annotated. A much lower number of the North American ones are.

Comapre https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?quality_grade=needs_id%2Cresearch&place_id=97391&taxon_id=41800

to https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?quality_grade=needs_id%2Cresearch&place_id=97394&taxon_id=41798

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Yeah, bit of a yikes to not include South America here, but not unexpected.

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European Badger Meles meles
3,980 observations

American Badger Taxidea taxus
2,191 observations

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At least wiki says american ones are active through day while european ones are more nocturnal, so it makes sense to have less “alive” observations, but I think on iNat we also miss all the people who are into footprints seriously, they’re almost nonexistent outside of NA as there’s really nobody iding those tracks on iNat (or with knowledge big enough to id harder things). To add of course lack of tracking culture outside of hunting is to blame too.

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there is plenty of US-centric stuff in science and naturalism, but also iNat started in California and for a while wasn’t much used outside of that area, so there’s also some ‘bias’ that way.

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