it occurred to me last night / this morning that i could probably take the results from the UTFGrid tiles that the iNaturalist API serves up and use them to create my own custom observation maps. so when i got some time this evening, i tried to create my own custom map based on UTFGrid data, and it actually worked out better than i expected. i think UTFGrids might be a little less precise, but they are much more customizable than either iNat’s standard observation tiles or GBIF’s tiles, and they offer all the query options that iNat provides. below is an example of all observations from iNat. i compared it against another map i created from GBIF (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/observation-density/6305/6), and it looks similar (which is good from a data quality perspective). i’ll probably work on it a little bit more when i get time just for fun, but if anyone is interested in it, i’ll clean it up a little bit more and can share the code when it’s more functional.
UPDATE: i was doing some more sanity checks on the data before i got too far down the road of coding something that turned out later to be flawed – so far, things look ok – and i just wanted to share some more maps that i thought were interesting.
here’s a map that shows observations over the last 4 years (r=2019, y=2018, g=2017, b=2016, brightest dots represent at least 20k observations). you can sort of see how iNat usage is spreading across the world:
this map shows observations over the last 4 months (r=Oct, y=Sept, g=Aug, b=July, brightest dots represent at least 2500 observations):
this map shows observations Monarchs over the last 4 months (r=Oct, y=Sept, g=Aug, b=July, brightest dots represent at least 25 observations). you can sort of see a shift in observations over these months related to migration:
