As an added feature, you could make an option for the hexagons to align with iNat’s geomodel hexagons. This could help users who want to fill in hexagons to help train the geomodel maybe?
The iNat squares are zoom level dependent, not fixed. So as you zoom in, you’ll see more and more squares, making it pretty tough to gamify it. You’d have to remember what zoom level you care about, and then there’s no way to see the borders in finer detail. You can guess “I think that square is roughly in XYZ area” but it’s tough to know for certain since you can’t zoom in.
okay, but say you could control the particular zoom level of the grid that you’re looking for, it seems like you could use that existing framework to get information – especially large numbers of observations – relatively efficiently. (doing the aggregation in your own hex grid doesn’t scale well with more observations.)
This is SO cool!! The citsci literature talks a lot about how gamifying data collection like this could encourage more observations from more remote/agricultural areas that are way under-represented on iNat. Here is an actual example of how that might look! Great work @rawcomposition .
Check it out @jellyturtle @rolandisimo .
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Not sure if you have plans for developing this further but what would be REALLY cool is a leaderboard showing users who have observed in the most grid cells in the specified sampling grid. E.g. if I could look up who has observed at the most grid cells in Colorado. I think that would really heighten the gamification value.
Something that does this well that might be useful to have on your radar: “Wandrer.earth” ( https://wandrer.earth/dashboard ). It’s an app that uses Strava data (Strava is an app for people to track their runs and bike rides) and displays all the places you’ve ever recorded a run/bike. And there’s a leaderboard where you can see how many “unique miles” you have traveled and compare it to others. E.g. the top user in Colorado has apparently traveled 6.5% of the total available roads/trails in the state! Anyway, having some kind of leaderboard like this for your site would be super cool. And then, I’d be very interested in a study assessing whether users who start tracking their participation in this way begin observing in less-sampled areas (which would be a great benefit to the scientist users of iNaturalist!).
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yes, good point - this is not a completely new feature, but it adds two things:
- the subtotal/total ratio presented prominently.
- a static size of location divisions (mentioned by user rawcomposition)
not groundbreaking, but both make it more convenient to track one’s personal progress