I have no complaints about this situation. On the contrary, it is extremely logical in terms of where the inat was founded.
However, whenever I tag those who id’ed a species the most, top identifier, I usually get the response “I only know US plants etc”.
Is there a lack of advertising and promotion outside the US? My impression is that the iNat has not spread to the world as much as eBird. Especially Non-Western countries. I see in Australia its very popular. But how about Pakistan?
Maybe local experts in other countries do not show enough interest. Its another problem.
I live in Turkiye and the observations here receive incredibly little identification. Although @m_gokmen @albach @meteorquake @yuri_pigorov and many others work very intensivel, but the number of local experts is very low. US experts are hesitant to id the observations. Its understandable.
Can’t such promotion or local campaigns or cooperation projects with local authorities be considered? Maybe a little push is necessary in the non-Western countries.
My native language is not English, i hope i did not offend anybody :) Thanks.
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There is a lack of readily avaliable information to me about Chironomids in Turkiye. I have more resources covering central africa than i do for Turkiye. That’s the reason for myself why i don’t ID there much. This is just an example, for some taxa in certain parts of the world. There is a lack of resources or studies.
But the larger issue i think is userbase size as you describe.
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I think plants are also a taxon that gets less attention, I have seen a lot of complaints about bias against plants as well
I know some of the ant experts ID globally
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I wouldn’t say that plants get less attention but rather there are more plant observations than any other taxa so proportionately it will seem as if they might get less attention.
Additionally, plants can often have much more limited ranges than animals which increases identifier regional specificity.
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For me it is rather that I don’t know of a good flora for some parts of the world, including TR. If someone asks me for assistance and I am not personally very familiar with the area, I do at least have a decent eye for higher-level taxonomic distinctions (such as family) and working facility with dichotomous keys and so forth, and I try to look up some resources for the area. However, sometimes there is only a checklist or nothing at all available for the area, and I can’t help.
I don’t have much to comment on with regards to promoting use of iNaturalist – I currently myself live in a very well botanised area of the United States and so there’s not much to do here. But certainly I think there’s room to grow international usage of the app worldwide. I suspect there are some existing forum threads about that same topic.
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iNat was started in the US and is one of the reasons why a significant portion of the user base is from there. So there will be an inherent bias towards the majority of observations, though as time goes on this seems to be improving.
I think the biggest issue is readily available identification information in the form of keys, guides or old papers.
I am also Turkish, but currently an expat, and if I knew the resources I might id in Turkiye more often, might be worth making a journal post about resources you know.
Some people are more shy about expanding beyond their region of comfort even if they might be competent.
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The statistics for top identifiers on the observation pages are global statistics – they do not tell you where identifiers are active.
You may have more success if you instead check the top IDer list from the taxon page and limit the region to Turkey. This will not help solve the lack of local identifiers – I agree that is a challenge in some parts of the world – but it should help you to find those people who are comfortable providing IDs for observations in your region.
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Yes but instead, isnt is possible to “top identifier” section be designed as “top identifier in the same area” or sth?
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There is an open feature request for this. Agreed it would be very helpful. I am the top identifier for several families, mostly because I have made a lot of IDs for one common species in my home country. I don’t know much about that family in the rest of the world.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/show-top-identifiers-by-continent-by-default/15310
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If you filter for a location you can get the top identifier for a region
vs
and you can have it permanently set to a location through your settings
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It seems to me that the title of this post: Maybe User Population Too US Based?
Is different from the subject that most of the replies above are addressing: Maybe IDer Expertise Too US Based?
I do have some comments that address the title of the post. Specifically:
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Do you have City Nature Challenge projects to support and promote in Turkiye?
Just one
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2025-kahramanmaras
Perhaps you can help ID there to encourage those new iNatters?
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The data doesn’t seem to support this statement. Currently there are 93 million plant observations from 172 k species compared to 123 million animal observations from 312 k species. Moreover, there are 238 k plant identifiers (about 0.002 identifiers per observation) vs. 317 k animal identifiers (about 0.002 identifiers per observation).
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I know almost nothing about the different versions within the iNat network around the globe, such as iNat UK or iNat Australia, but do they have local affiliations/cooperators that the US iNat does not have? Does Turkiye have such an arrangement or are all records from that country included in the US-based version of the website?
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miswording on my part, of the “iconic taxa” the kingdom plantae is the most observed
most of animalia observation are birds and arachnids
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I’m from Egypt and found iNat through Egyptian naturalists. The user population is much smaller so that means we have much less observations and species distributions but it also seems to be much more dedicated — I tend to get identifications faster from there than when visiting the US. Same in the UK, almost instant IDs. I agree promotion campaigns especially with local groups would be great
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not more than kingdom animalia, the iconic taxa are not of equal rank
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Yes but prolific identifiers, at specially at a species level usually restrict themselves to one iconic taxa unless they are identifying unkowns.
I don’t know any animalia identifiers who do both birds and fish or any other crossing, I am sure those people exist just very few cross lines.
There’s plenty of other forum posts talking about the percent research grade and which taxa need the most id’ing.
As an amateur, non-academic nature lover, that lives in a Westernish country, I can attest that many local ‘experts’ -and, to a lesser extent, some unquoted Experts- disregard iNaturalist and minimize its importance as a participatory science tool
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