I put together a little web app that let’s you configure a personal “territory” and track your progress of recording iNaturalist observations across that territory. The point is to provide motivation to check out new areas you otherwise wouldn’t have any reason to visit.
The hexagon grid uses a global, fixed, positioning system. So if you or your friend’s territories overlap, the overlapping cells will share identical boundaries. This could open the door to create a global leaderboard and some other gamification if it seemed worthwhile in the future.
If you use it on your phone, it can show your current location on the map. Also, all data is currently just stored in the browser, there’s no server at all. So if you clear your browsing data, your territories will need to be re-created. You can also export them and import them again later if you need. It also functions pretty much like an app if you use the Share → Add to Home Screen feature in your browser.
I like it, but I have too many observations for it to work unfortunately :/ Even using the bare minimum 1km radius around my (old) home (which only gives me a single hexagon anyway!), I have more than 2000 sightings so it just doesn’t work. All my sightings there are from several years ago as well, so I can’t restrict the settings at all either.
Good catch, I misunderstood the API documentation and assume obscured observations weren’t included in the unauthenticated API, but apparently they are, just with the incorrect coordinates. Should be fixed now.
it seems like the only point of this is to provide hexagonal grid for the user to fill in with observations, as a means of gamification, i guess? i don’t understand how that’s any better than using any other arbitrary grid, and i don’t really understand why anyone would have any incentive to try to fill in any arbitrary grid in the first place. am i missing something?
Neat app! I only played with it for a few minutes, but I like the idea.
A few suggestions:
I was hoping to create a territory within a large local park, but the smallest hexagon is almost the full size of the park. Consider allowing very small territories/hexagons.
The radius is a little limiting - you could use shapes of existing iNaturalist places to bound the hexagons, and add a lookup for places in the add territory form.
Your github repo is lacking an open source license. Consider adding one.
This looks really interesting, but I think a potentially better way to get value out of this design is to change from observations to species. Being able to see species distribution in this way would be a great way to visualise gaps in records/distribution in iNat.
Personally, I would find this a great way to focus efforts on species/locations with few records, especially if there was a way to see this in an app - i.e. draw a circle/hexagon on a map and see which species have not been recorded here and try and find them.
I expanded this to 4000, but this requires 20 requests because the API is limited to 200 per page, so your mileage may vary on how useful that actually is.
This is 100% not a criticism of the tool, because I’ve been looking at it and its really fun, but I think its funny how it highlights places that I haven’t been to because they would require trespassing. If I want to get hard core about filling out all my hexagons, I have to sneak into a bison reserve
