Show heatmaps of our observations and identifications on user profiles

Feature Requests
22

Then I think they erred. This thread is requesting something that is already coded on the website, be placed visually on the profile.

You are asking for something entirely unique and novel (in regards to iNat). It does not exist on iNaturalist.

Regardless I still feel you’re not even trying. I looked at your other reply and it’s very clear to me you haven’t attempted to navigate or understand the website, or apps. Otherwise you would know that the species box would fill in after it loads.

You don’t have to be tech savvey, you just have to be willing to put some effort into learning something. I may not be as old as you, but I rediscovered the joys of learning very recently.

What does this have to do with you being a travelling wildlife photographer? That’s the niche. How incredibly fortunate for you to be able to do something like that. It is however, an incredibly small population of people.

I put together this helpful image to show you what iNaturalist is capable of.

Screenshot_20260626_185123_iNaturalist
Screenshot_20260626_185123_iNaturalist1440×2796 878 KB

23

what you’re asking for is a choropleth visualization. i don’t have any opinion whether that sort of thing should be implemented in the system, but it is possible to create your own visualization. see https://forum.inaturalist.org/search?q=choropleth.

here’s an example visualization of species count (not observation count) by USA states:

image
image664×1026 65.5 KB

24

I think this is an example of people inferring their personal experience onto a user base of 4,000,000+ people. I live in Costa Rica and from my experience, EVERYONE that uses iNaturalist uses it during travels. While a few people here may only use it locally, the largest portion of Costa Ricans who use it, use it over the entire country, not just their local area. Most of the biggest users use it in Costa Rica and throughout Latin America. But the biggest user base here is from tourists interested in learning about the country’s biodiversity. They are not from here but use iNat to help them learn and appreciate nature - just like the developers of iNat intended.

I find this pattern extends throughout northern South America, too. Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, all have iNat databases largely generated by travelers.

25

I live in Costa Rica and from my experience, EVERYONE that uses iNaturalist uses it during travels.

Correct. I too do this.

think this is an example of people inferring their personal experience onto a user base of 4,000,000+ people.

While a few people here may only use it locally, the largest portion of Costa Ricans who use it, use it over the entire country, not just their local area.

This is an entirely subjective argument. “Country” and “local” vary greatly from place to place. For instance, the province I live in, within the country of Canada, Ontario. Is twenty times bigger than your entire country. Meaning the sevenish~ (According to maps) hour drive it takes you to go from north to south in Costa Rica. It takes three times that to cross my province. So local to me means 1-2 hours drive worth of space to work with.

Today I did a six hour drive through part of my province, for my own work. So I essentially drove your entire country without leaving my province. To have the same effect as the user’s request, you’d need to break my province down into districts. For which there are ten. But then the question becomes how can you compare districts to states. It gets muddy quickly. Heck, according to google, the district I live in, is only slightly smaller than your entire country. Algoma region at(48,281 km²) vs Costa Rica at (51,100 km²).

But the biggest user base here is from tourists interested in learning about the country’s biodiversity.

I think you entirely missed my point. It’s not rare for people to travel. It is however, rare for an individual to do enough traveling to merit the amount of work required to implement the request. That is my point. I consider those who are able to travel blessed, myself included. Most “Tourists” only get to travel one, maybe twice a year outside their country.

26

Yeah, “travel” for me generally means day trips using public transport/trains. Probably around 90% of my observations are made within 50 km of where I live. A chloropleth of my observations by country or state would be pretty meaningless. The map view on iNat provides a better sense of what areas I have visited or not visited.

I doubt I am particularly unusual in this among active iNat observers.

27

I will note that the Forum Moderator who suggested Tom post here is the OP, so they felt that the feature request was relevant, and I agree with them. Also, in regards to

there’s no need to imply that someone is “not even trying” or unwilling to learn. We are asked to assume that others mean well on the Forum (and iNat) and focus on ideas, not personal criticism.

From the Forum Guidelines:

  • Criticize ideas and opinions, not people.

  • Unless there’s evidence to the contrary, assume someone’s making a good faith effort to express their thoughts.

29

I see differently! These are two night an day requests that really only have being a map in common. We have to have the new map created for it to be implemented in the way the original user requested the heat map to be. So it’s not implementation, it’s creation.

But I won’t argue about it any longer.

So, I’m not implying or assuming. I view a lack of willingness to even try to learn the service as very obvious evidence of “lack of good faith”.

The user was told there was a function similar to what they needed. Instead of asking how to achieve this, they claimed to be “not tech savvy” and would prefer someone else put the effort into conceptualizing, coding, and implementing this request than learn to simply search the website. Which is not that hard to grasp on your own either way.

Obstinacy is a lack of good faith.

30

I’m not sure where you’re getting this from. I even said above that some of the zoom levels on the existing heatmaps don’t look good. Feature requests should be relatively actionable but the details in implementation will always be a little different and are up for discussion.

31

Not looking good isn’t the same as not existing.

The map that Tom is asking for does not exist on iNaturalist as far as i’m aware. The heat map does. Meaning Tom’s request is almost entirely unactionable until some one creates the map to begin with.

32

The “good faith” that the guidelines refer to is the fairly standard way this term is used, e,g,:

“Good faith” is a sincere, honest intention to be fair, open, and honest in your dealings with others. It means fulfilling your promises without intending to deceive, defraud, or take unfair advantage of the other party."

There’s no indication that the poster was intending to deceive, be dishonest, or treat someone unfairly. In fact, they are quite transparent about their motivations.

Regardless of one’s definition of “good faith”, however, this approach

and the parts I quoted of your previous post go against the guidelines that ask us to criticize ideas, but not other people. Please refrain from that in the future.

33

Well, that certainly looks good, as it breaks things down and separates them by state boundaries, which is of such importance. If something like this were implemented to appear by default on each user’s profile page, it would certainly be very helpful … especially if it worked so that you could just move the cursor to hover over any state and it would have a popup thing automatically appear with the total species and total observations in that state. And then if you click on that state it gives a more complete breakdown of how many species / observations of insects, mammals, birds, plants, etc.

And of course it could be adjusted to show the world with a breakdown of all the countries instead of a country with all of the states/provinces.

It seems like a lot to ask but really it’s only asking for what eBird already has for every user, by default. It would be extremely useful for people who are goal-oriented and want to achieve a given number of obs or species within given territorial boundaries. It’s also a super useful way to see just where other users do most of their iNatting by just viewing their profile page.

34

Oh yes, to me the whole point would be to foster a better degree of “gamification”. The gamification of things is what makes me tick, what gets me out into nature even more, and what gets me to explore more distant habitats.

For example, I have already seen and photographed Canvasback ducks in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. But that means there are 42 other states in the contiguous U.S. that I have not recorded them in. So my goal is to get the Canvasback species in every one of the 48 contiguous states. These kinds of goals are what get me to work harder to find more wildlife.

The kind of interactive map that I am describing will certainly help people track their progress toward such goals much better than the existing map features do. I don’t want to have to sit at my computer and figure out how to calculate my totals … I want a feature that just does it all for me, by default. That way my time and mental energy are spent posting observations and discussing things on this forum (things I love to do!), instead of figuring out how to use software (something I strongly dislike doing).

35

i’m not actively developing my thing, although someone else could adapt/fork it to do whatever they wanted, if they wanted to.

@glauber735 made something similar, although it’s doing a binary visualization of observations by USA state. he does seem to be actively working on these pages. so you could ask him for additional features like the ability to display based on species count (as an option to observation count), to visualize based on a gradient (as an option instead of binary), additional parameters, etc.

or if you want to create your own visualization, you can get state-level observation and species counts for the USA using this: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_places?place_id=2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52&stats=observations,species. there are lots of programs (ex. Excel) and websites out there that will create choropleths fairly easily with data like this.

just based on what i’ve observed in the past, i think it would be very unlikely that iNat staff would work on something like this. besides the gamification thing that bouteloua talked about, it’s just complicated because of the way iNat defines their standard places vs how you would have to visualize them. (for example, notice that in usual choropleth maps of the USA, Alaska and Hawaii are shifted from where they actually are geographically for better visualization, but handling that sort of thing means they would end up having to maintain and reconcile another set of boundaries for what they do now vs this special visualization.)

36

Yes, to make the iNat maps useful, the way iNat designates their locations would have to be completely re-vamped from the ground up. The current way the maps here work does not foster the growth of any type of goal-setting or gamification. If one wants to set a bunch of geographically-defined goals for one’s self, or compete with others for the most species in a given municipality, it is pretty much impossible to do here without having to do “extra work”. The way eBird works is really quite ideal for goal-setting and gamification, and it serves as a wonderful model for how things could be implemented here.

37

What makes you think the iNaturalist team wants you to be incentivized drive to all 48 contiguous states to photograph common birds? My impression has always been that iNaturalist’s focus is sparking interest in the nature around you, not list building over arbitrary district lines.

38

Yes, agreed.

I think features whose primary raison d’être is gamification are really not being considered. I don’t think this request’s sole purpose is gamification (I think it’s cool aside from that aspect myself), but I don’t guess that arguments based on its value for gamification will help encourage its implementation.

39

I am thinking of what I, and other users want. This is what the iNaturalist team should be thinking of, as well. It’s supposed to be about the users, not the platform.

40

I’m sure some users want more gamification. I’m also sure some users want less (I’ve seen the sentiment that observation leaderboards should be removed expressed here a few times before and I’m at least a little sympathetic). Gamification probably would increase the number of observations, but also comes with a whole host of side effects. Competitiveness regularly invites unscrupulous behavior. It might sound silly for something as seemingly benign (benevolent even?) as iNaturalist, but I do also think gamification exploits human tendencies towards addiction in a way I find a little uncomfortable sometimes (I’ve seen people obsess over their streak or leaderboard position in whatever app in a way that seems a little unhealthy, for instance). The team might be worried about the carbon impact of people driving long distances just to get their state totals up.

I agree that platforms should prioritize the wants of the userbase, but I also think it’s fine for a platform to have a specific vision and scope and adhere to this. If the iNaturalist team doesn’t want their platform to be gamified I think that’s a respectable decision for a non-profit to make, and they make it exceptionally easy for outside parties to make their own gamification extensions through the API (which plenty do).

And again, I have nothing against the heatmap in the original proposal (I actually think that would be cool!), and I’m fine with the chloropeth visualization you’re describing being added, I’m just pointing out that they’ve made it clear they don’t want to prioritize “gamification”, and that I feel this is a reasonable position to take.

41

So you think websites and organizations with millions of users should cater to every whim of each individual user?

You have been told by just about everyone in this thread that it’s not really what iNat is for. And please keep in mind, we’re users too. So please only speak for yourself.