With iNat down for about an hour, I thought I’d share this neat graphic @loarie made a few weeks ago, which shows one hour of iNat activity at around 9 am Pacific Time on October 20th.
The lines are IDs which were added during that hour, originating at the IP address of the identifier (with the location obscured a bit) and going to the observation’s public location. The dots are observations added during that hour, so the lines and dots won’t necessarily line up. Pretty cool!
Very, very cool! I’m surprised there were so many more new identifications than new
observations; were the identifications made by the observer counted as new identifications? Even if that’s true, there were still more IDs made than observations, which means for at least that one hour, we crazy identifiers were gaining on the backlog!
That is amazing to see those dynamics of IDs to observations! Would there be another figure showing the other side of the planet (Asia) ? Or, does the figure rotate?
It’s really very, very nice to see the global interactions.
Cool graphic! It had me confused for a second, thinking huh this doesn’t look like planet Earth unless it’s a timewarp back to Pangaea or something. Until it clicked that the blue were the continents, not the oceans. Just sharing so y’all can have a laugh at me, too. LOL
It was night in Asia during this hour so there wasn’t much activity on that side of the globe, but it would be cool to make one during daylight hours there. The image doesn’t rotate.
If there’s going to be one for the other side of the world, please make sure Australia is nicely visible, as well as Asia!
I always liked graphics like that :)
Have a very good weekend, from a rather wet south-eastern Australia!
Waving back from Cape Town - where our lights were ON when this hour was captured. Can’t iNat during loadshedding, we get lost in the Atlantic Ocean as we head to California.
I’ve never quite understood why people spend their time agreeing with Research Grade observations. I can see it for experts on obscure taxa (fungi, beetles, whatever those marine inverts are that I have no clue about), but for, say, a good photo of an obvious adult American Robin? Is it just a sense of self-importance? Essentially, just saying, “I was here.” When I think of the millions of non-Research Grade but perfectly identifiable observations out there, I think: we could use some help over here, people.
People have explained on an earlier thread - some like to add an ID as their way of recording - seen this one - if they focus on reviewing all obs of That species
I might add a third ID to Research Grade if both people seem new, and might be simply accepting the iNat suggestion and then agreeing.
But I choose to work thru Unknown or Needs ID myself.
Ah, that makes sense for people to be making a mark, so to speak, that they have reviewed that observation. Ditto adding a third ID if it seems as though people are blindly accepting what iNat suggests.
But I’m with you in terms of concentrating on the Unknowns and Needs ID.
I think we all want this to a permanent feature active in real time, rotating (but user perspective adjustable) and showing what’s in light and what’s in shadow. Can you devote an ungodly amount of server resources to make this happen? ;-)
There appear to be cultural differences as well. To pick up your earlier example, if I post a clear picture of an American robin, it quickly gets a confirming ID to reach RG, drops out of the needs ID pool, and that’s it. If I post a picture of a European robin, it keeps accumulating more IDs. I have observations of plants from Germany that have more IDs than any of my North American birds. So it seems identifiers over there are more prone to adding IDs to RG observations than identifiers over here in the US.
I was really hoping to be able to point at a line and go “hey that’s me!!” but on that day I chose to identify a whole bunch at 4am (8 hours too early) and a few at 2pm (2 hours too late)… fricken insomnia
Here’s a spinning version https://inaturalist.github.io/globe/
its made with 10m of data (was pretty slow at least on my browser with an hour’s worth of data) from around noon PST Nov 8. The identifier locations continue to be obscured a bit.
