Nice lil maps to include on user profiles would be heatmaps of our observations and identifications:
These are mine. Sorry for cropping out most of the world.
A dark map base might be better.
These are mine. Sorry for cropping out most of the world.
A dark map base might be better.
oh this is so cool. totally want this. gotta go delete a vote brb
This is indeed too cool! I wants, I wants!
Thanks Cassi, that’d be cool!
Oh yeah! I love this idea!
How did you make these?
My observations: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/map?user_id=bouteloua
My identifications: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/map?ident_user_id=bouteloua
Everyone’s observations: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/map
Some of the zoom levels render the heatmap strangely but others look nice.
I often look at profile and then users observations just to see where their usual haunts are, and this on the profile would be a neat way to see it!
This is a great idea but likely wouldn’t be implemented until we re-design the profile page. Will add it to ideas for that redesign, and am closing this topic.
@bouteloua is there a key to the no. of observations needed to move to the next colour on these maps?
That’s really cool.
Looking at mine there are quite a few observations that are missing though…
I would love better - much better - map features here in iNat. But personally, showing my observations in the “heat map” style wouldn’t be as useful to me as it is to you.
What I would love to see are maps that break a user’s observations down by continent, country, and state/province/territory. The way eBird does it is perfect. I literally could not come up with any improvement in the eBird map feature because it works so perfectly for someone like me.
The eBird map is right there on the user’s profile home page. You don’t have to click anything to get it to come up. You just click on any user’s name, and … “whoop, there it is!”
Once you see the map, it shows the world, but you can just hover your mouse over the world map and it shows the info for any country you hover over … and a little box pops up showing how many species the user has seen in that country.
If you then click on the country, it will bring up a map of just that country, and then it will show all of the states/territories/provinces within that country. And you can just move the cursor over any of those states, and a little box will pop up that shows how many species the user has reported in that state.
I love that it works this way because it helps me set goals. It helps me easily see what areas I am weakest in, and what areas I am strongest in. It shows me where I need to go to build or fill out species lists for various areas.
The current iNat maps do not show information in this way at all, and frankly they are hard to navigate and hard to find and even when I do find them it is hard to quickly see exactly what municipality an observation is in, and I do not know how to quickly isolate one municipality from the others to be able to see, for example, how many species I have seen in Arizona vs. how many species I have seen in California vs. how many species I have seen in Illinois or New York. Seeing things in this way is essential to my growth as an observer of nature, and the current maps here are not helpful in this capacity.
EDIT: Note that the bird maps are color-coded, with states that a user has zero sightings in as being blank, and pale yellow for states that a user has seen very few species in, and then it goes to dark red for the states that a user has seen the most species in. For many eBird users, they see those blank states and the pale yellow states on their profile page and they want to do whatever they can to make those areas orange or red. In this way, the maps incentivize us to get out and find more species and report more sightings.
This would be far more niche, and likely only useful to people who travel a lot. It’s also not the hardest to get that information if you really want it. It works for ebird, because birders tend to travel to see birds.
You say iNaturalist is confusing to search, which is confusing to me. It only took me like thirty seconds to get the boundary box for Arizona..
If you think your request is valid, I think you should create a separate thread. Instead of asking for something non-related to this thread.
Ok, but the Forum Moderator who started this thread suggested that I post this here, in this thread. That is why I did so. I’m not just going off-topic in a rogue manner, but following the suggestion of an authority.
Yeah, but you probably knew what things to click on or scroll to or type to get that info. Someone like me is not really very “web-savvy”, and it is very frustrating to have to figure out what to do in order to find things like this. With the eBird maps, it is right there in front of my eyes without me needing to figure anything out at all. That’s what works for me. Plus, while I see that you have Arizona filled in with red, I am not seeing where it says how many different species you have found there. How would you find that info? Is it a process that takes a minute or two, or can you just find that with a single click or by hovering the cursor over something.
By the way, I absolutely travel for iNat observations. The entire point of doing this nature thing and being a part of iNaturalist is to see how many species I can document across as wide an area as possible. For instance, having at least 200 documented species in every one of he 48 contiguous United States is a big goal of mine. A life-defining goal. The current map makes tracking my progress towards that goal a complicated (for me) effort, while the way the eBird maps work make it super easy, even effortless!
In their screenshot, it would appear at the top of the image there where it says “observations” “species” “observers” “identifiers”. The app just hadn’t finished loading.
On the website you’d click “Your observations” at the top of any page, then use the grey Filter button to select a state in the “Place” section. That would get you here, for example, for Washington state: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=46&subview=map&user_id=tom_reichner&verifiable=any (you’d have to search every state individually to see all the results from your eBird screenshot though)
The iNat staff do tend to avoid incorporating features of gamification so I could see defining the separated borders and adding new geopolitical-based stats as more liable to change user behavior than just depicting heatmaps.
I just wanted to check recent forum posts and wasn’t planning on spending an hour playing with this…