i suppose any data source would be biased, but if you prefer to see just iNaturalist, below are the observations from iNaturalist sent to GBIF. (so this should be just a subset of Research Grade observations from iNat that are at least a certain age. i still didn’t get the maps directly from iNaturalist because i still prefer GBIF’s density maps.)
based on this latest view, i no longer really see the distinct Scandinavian hot spot, and i don’t see the distinct South Sudan and North Korea dark spots. instead, i see bright spots in North America, Western Europe, New Zealand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Africa, Australia, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, and a few other places.
to me, this looks a lot like a global wealth map, with maybe a slight bias in favor of countries with iNaturalist portals (the original US, Mexico, NZ, Israel, etc.). other than that, i do notice some places that are probably destination nature spots – various islands are particularly bright, Ecuador is bright, Tanzania is bright, the giant parks in northern Benin and neighboring countries are brighter than the giant West African cities along the coast, etc… so maybe it’s like a wealth map, mixed with a rich person’s vacation map for nature watching.
the distinct US-Mexico border is still here, too…
EDIT: in case anyone else wants to recreate this in ArcGIS Online, here’s the tile layer URL i used: https://api.gbif.org/v2/map/occurrence/density/{level}/{col}/{row}@1x.png?srs=EPSG:3857&style=purpleYellow.point&publishingOrg=28eb1a3f-1c15-4a95-931a-4af90ecb574d
