Top Observers On The Site

General
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I don’t think there are less species, rather less coverage.

  • Landlocked Utah has 467 recorded bird species while New York has 496 from their official state lists (458 and 660 on iNat, respectively)
  • Most states in the American West have around 1000 native bee species (numbers vary from 1600 in California to 850 in Nevada versus 770 in the entire Eastern half of the continent)
  • New Mexico is arid, cold, and has 3,783 species of vascular plants (4,513 on iNat …) - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-Native-Plant-Species-by-State_fig1_269111706
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With many taxa it’s not hard to find out species is single or about changes in taxonomy from iNat alone: other ids, comments, maps of ranges, there’s a taxonomy tree which can be both full or not, but you can look up GBIF or other websites. Expert is an overused word as something dividing elite from peasants, for iNat you need certaint qualities about you and your knowledge to be called expert, different from those of regular science community. All the “normal” experts learnt from an expert before them, so isn’t it the same? Keys for many things rely on macrosigns, so you can just analyze what cv suggests and learn, will there be mistakes? Certainly, but that’s the process, as an expert you also should know what you can’t id, not only what you can, expertise is limited no matter who we talk about.

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iNat uses scientific taxa, so we must abide by those definitions. If that weren’t true, iNat couldn’t legitimately share its data with the wider scientific community. Everyone should do whatever they can to ensure that there is some scientific basis to their identifications.

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On the contrary, one of the top observers I’ve interacted with observes the same species over and over again, to the point of photographing a hundred individuals of the same shrub species in one session.

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As one of the top observers, I can offer the following.

  • use a lens that allows you to take closeups, habitat, habit in one go: so a telephoto/macro lens is crucial.
  • do all your framing when you take the picture. having to crop afterwards takes a lot of time.
  • I take a GPS to track my route: I use Geosetter to add the coordinates to the photo exifs. A thousand photographs takes about 5-19 minutes. I have played with GPS cameras but the batteries dont last - for a 3-5 day hike, camera batteries are a limitation.
  • I use autorotate to orientate the pictures - again a few minutes does a few thousand orientations without having to do anything else.
  • live in a species rich part of the the earth. If you pass 1000 species on a 5 hour hike, taking lots of pictures is easy. For instance: Tokai Park (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/tokai-park-restoration-study) has over 700 wild plant species in 600ha. (yes some only occur in the year after a fire, and over 200 are alien invasive species, but there are LOTS!)
  • concentrate on groups that can get an ID for. In the Cape, plants are good. Insects are pointless: about 3/4 are not described, and those that are, need genital dissection. It is cool that there are perhaps 1000 species of Monkey Beetle (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=122243&taxon_id=489493&verifiable=any&view=species) in the Cape, but half are not described, and some need dissection to go below tribe level, and only a dozen or so species can be identified from pictures. Similarly, having the second highest richness of bee species in the world (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=123067&taxon_id=630955&verifiable=any&view=species) is meaningless if the species cannot be identified on iNaturalist - besides they are shy, and it takes 15 minutes of sitting still before they will approach any flower that you are observing. Plants dont run away and hide.
  • make it a quest to try and get records of all species in your different nature reserves and parks. Better still try and help managers by mapping where in the reserves the species can be found. Which routes, sections, communities and veld ages the species occur in.
  • In any day, make sure that one observation is detailed. Subsequent records in the area can be habit shots, or closeups or artistic, but for an easily identifiable species, repeating habit, habitat, closeup of branch, flower front, flower side, macros of diagnostics, etc. is pointless.
  • use a high speed internet. In many parts of the world, this is not an option.
  • use a computer geared for mapping and analytical work. That way you can upload 100-150 pictures at a time. Uploading is the big bottleneck
  • dont be fanatical about identifications. With 9000 plant species in the Cape, acknowledge that there will be gaps in your ID capabilities, and ID to your level of comfort. But knowing a fair fraction of the species and most of the genera and all the families helps. My particular blindspot is trees - I cannot get a handle on them (even though we have only a few hundred species). Use both the AI to prompt your memory, and the dictionary search when you are not certain of spelling or gender, or are having a senior moment. For us, iNaturalist is now better than any of the available field guides - more species, more pictures, faster searching - and most usefully pictures of really rare species not found anywhere else except expensive illustrated monographs (which we have lots of, and if you are rich you may have some).
  • I am not a single species fanatic. But occasionally an alien or rare species is in spectacular flower or growth and can easily be observed and mapped. Take the opportunity to extensively map it: as finely as circumstances allow. Having a chauffeur helps, but I still need to perfect my camera settings. And it only works for easily identifiable species.
  • use iNaturalist’s maps to see which trails and routes you have not been on, or have not visited in a particular season. Target the gaps - go and explore new areas! For instance: why not try and guess where I will be hiking next weekend? (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&subview=map&user_id=tonyrebelo&verifiable=any) - zoom in and find the gaps.

By contrast to this, my limitations are:

  • my hiking partners are peak baggers and fitness freaks. I am usually running and playing catch-up. Each photo looses me 5-10 steps. A complex species can leave me 100m behind the group. And they are totally unsympathetic. Keep up or go home. I dont have time to put on and off glasses.
  • I am half blind: old age. I have to rely on the autofocus, and if the picture is out of focus, I will only find out when processing the pictures, then I have to decide if I leave the species out of the route, or include the bad photo. The bottom line: can a species-level ID be made? Quality is relative: for me ID-quality counts. Near-perfect photos require hours and are a totally different goal.
  • for detailed trips, allow about the same time for uploading as you spent taking the pictures. Processing more than 300 observations per evening is almost impossible. So a full weekend’s hike will take a week’s evenings to process. During summer you will accumulate a backlog for processing in winter. Some dedication is required: it helps not to have children and other hobbies as distractions (but surely hiking great mountains, finding species, making identifications and.sharing them is enough - oh and photography counts as a hobby too? - what is so cool is that iNat integrates them all so effectively.)
  • smartphone apps are beyond me. Besides I am involved in several hundred projects, and there are too many to use with the app. Adding them afterwards requires website work, which takes longer than uploading via the website. I only use smartphones for projects where other - more focussed - people are collecting the data.
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I relate! Even though I’m not a top observer, hands down the biggest limitation to my observing is a lack of perfect hiking partners. It’s too dangerous to go out alone, hiking club groups just leave me behind, and individual friends/family members either don’t want to go out or they say yes a few times and then realize how boring it is to stand around while I photograph the backs of daisies. My husband puts up with a lot, the poor man.

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This happens to me increasingly often. I’m not sure if my vision is going or if my hands are getting shaky, but seems like these days every time I go out, I think I am taking sufficient photos, yet when I get home half of them are revealed to be out of focus. It’s very frustrating.

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So? My words were not about scientific basis, please reread it.

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I think I know who you mean. That’s real dedication. I’ll never come close to that level of documenting what I see in any given area … a couple of representative photos is best I’ll do. There are only so many hours in a day. I’ve recently started going back to the many pics I took when I first got a digital camera almost 15 yrs ago and adding those to iNat. Some forgotten species in there I haven’t seen/photo’d in years.

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I don’t think there are less species, rather less coverage.

This doesn’t appear to be the case. NatureServe produced an estimate of species diversity per state for The Nature Conservancy. This diversity is calculated based on vertebrates, vascular plants, and heavily-studied invertebrate groups that have been sampled intensely enough that reported diversity is likely not biased by sampling issues (e.g., odonates).

Aside from New England, the states with the lowest gross diversity are Midwestern states such as the Dakotas, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. Arizona and New Mexico have some of the highest diversity, but these states are also well-known for their extreme environmental heterogeneity (e.g., the “sky islands” and similar environments allowing cold-adapted and desert taxa to exist in close proximity).

However, the states of the United States also vary a lot in terms of size, and thus the diversity reported here might be due to the amount of area spanned (e.g., potentially more habitats present with in a state’s borders, etc). So I took each state’s land area as per Wikipedia and used it to produce scaled diversity metrics controlling for state size (i.e., species per km^2). I used NatureServe’s numbers rather than iNat as I’ve noticed that the Western states are undersampled compared to their known diversity (i.e., records in GBIF and museum collections).

Once state size is accounted for, the states with the lowest diversity are Alaska (despite it’s huge size), followed by a bunch of states in the northern Rockies and the High Plains (Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, and Nevada). And Texas, but that might be because Texas is just so big.

The states with the highest diversity are the really small East Coast states (New England, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, D.C.), which might be due to size issue. That is, say, a state like Maryland and Virginia sample the same ecosystems, but because one is just larger than the other it inflates relative diversity metrics. But then after that you have Hawaii (also pretty small, but diverse with high rates of endemism), South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, and West Virginia. Tennessee and Alabama make perfect sense, both are known for their high biodiversity and high endemism, but Virginia, South Carolina, and West Virginia being relatively high diversity are a bit odd. Below are my numbers if anyone wants to check or is interested.

Relative species diversity scaled by square kilometer area of each state, sorted from minimum to maximum relative diversity per area. Species diversity comes from NatureServe’s “States of the Union: Ranking America’s Biodiversity” and state area taken from Wikipedia

State No. Species Area (km^2) Species per km^2
Alaska 1835 1,477,953 0.00124
Montana 2921 376,962 0.00775
Texas 6273 676,587 0.00927
North Dakota 1889 178,711 0.01057
South Dakota 2406 196,350 0.01225
Wyoming 3184 251,470 0.01266
Nebraska 2587 198,974 0.01300
Kansas 2778 211,754 0.01312
Colorado 3597 268,431 0.01340
Nevada 3872 284,332 0.01362
Minnesota 2817 206,232 0.01366
New Mexico 4583 314,161 0.01459
Idaho 3205 214,045 0.01497
Arizona 4759 294,207 0.01618
Oregon 4136 248,608 0.01664
California 6717 403,466 0.01665
Iowa 2533 144,669 0.01751
Utah 3892 212,818 0.01829
Missouri 3340 178,040 0.01876
Washington 3375 172,119 0.01961
Oklahoma 3616 177,660 0.02035
Wisconsin 2869 140,268 0.02045
Michigan 3135 146,435 0.02141
Illinois 3258 143,793 0.02266
Arkansas 3415 134,771 0.02534
Pennsylvania 3135 115,883 0.02705
New York 3333 122,057 0.02731
Maine 2352 79,883 0.02944
Mississippi 3580 121,531 0.02946
Georgia 4436 148,959 0.02978
Ohio 3152 105,829 0.02978
Louisiana 3495 111,898 0.03123
Florida 4368 138,887 0.03145
Kentucky 3258 102,269 0.03186
North Carolina 4131 125,920 0.03281
Indiana 3098 92,789 0.03339
Alabama 4533 131,171 0.03456
Tennessee 3772 106,798 0.03532
Virginia 3803 102,279 0.03718
West Virginia 2873 62,259 0.04615
South Carolina 3701 77,857 0.04754
Hawaii 1418 28313 0.05008
Vermont 2274 23,871 0.09526
New Hampshire 2327 23,187 0.10036
Maryland 3148 25,142 0.12521
Massachusetts 2765 20,202 0.13687
New Jersey 3022 19,047 0.15866
Connecticut 2497 12,542 0.19909
Delaware 2244 5,047 0.44462
Rhode Island 2078 2,678 0.77595
Washington D.C. 1909 158 12.08228

Doing a simple scatter plot of state area versus species diversity (Alaska is omitted from the graph below for clarity, “Dummy Data” is a dummy series of the entire dataset I had to add to plot the line in Excel as Excel could not plot separate symbols for each group and a total line, and I had to exclude Alaska from the line estimation because it was a huge outlier), there appears to be a clear trend where states in the Southeast tend to have higher than predicted diversity (particularly Tennessee and the coastal states, Missouri and Kentucky haver lower diversity more akin to the Great Plains States), but the High Plains and Rocky Mountain states (here excluding the Southwest, Texas, and Oklahoma), denoted by squares on the graph, have lower-than-predicted diversity based on state square area.

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There’s probably more that can be done with adding in addition factors examining how densely populated each state is (i.e., anthropogenic impacts), the mean annual precipitation per state, whether the state is inland/coastal, and the degree to which the state is mountainous, but as a very crude estimate it appears that the northern Rockies and High Plains states consistently have less biodiversity than the rest of the country, and the Southeast has the highest relative to land area.

This also agrees with some of the group-specific biodiversity data published by NatureServe. For reptiles, amphibians, and fishes the northern Rockies consistently rank rock-bottom in terms of diversity. However, the northern Rockies rank high in terms of mammalian diversity (likely due to retaining their megafauna). Birds seem to show a latitudinal diversity gradient relative to state, which may be because they are so vagile and migratory (or get blown off course). For vascular plants the states of the corn belt (e.g., Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas) tend to have the lowest diversity. This also agrees with the common sentiments in the scientific literature that biodiversity is positively correlated with latitude/temperature (i.e., the latitudinal diversity gradient) and precipitation (see, e.g., Adler and Levine 2007).

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I’ve had this too. What I’ve found is it’s often better to increase the ISO to much higher than you would expect to be useful, because between a fast moving animal or one’s hands shaking, the camera is often a lot less fast in terms of shutter speed than the human eye can focus. The quality of the image is lower, but at least it is viewable rather than being a blur.

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That article only uses species that “NatureServe currently has complete state-level distributional data” from 2002.

California has 7600 species, subspecies, and varieties of plants. We can use 4,693 species only from Jepson’s 1993 guide to be conservative.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520253124/the-jepson-manual

“While no one has added up the number of known insect species in California and new species are still being discovered, one conservative estimate is that there are about 27,000 insect species in California.”

http://calag.ucanr.edu/Archive/?article=ca.v049n06p51

Let’s add in 694 species (plus about 70 freshwater fish) of vertebrates.

https://wildlife.ca.gov/Data/CWHR/Life-History-and-Range

Those groups would move California from 35th to 10th, just behind Vermont on your list. That leaves saltwater fish, cetaceans, other sea species (algae, bivalves, etc), non-insect invertebrates and fungi (and there are potentially a lot of fungi in California’s diverse ecosystems).

https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/fungus-in-america-44-488-species-and-counting/

I’m confident that California and other western states have higher diversity than you give them credit for and fit well in the context of this thread of generating large quantities of observations on iNaturalist.

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For fun, the Cape Flora has 9,000 species of plants in 90,000km2 - And it wont fit on your graph - your Y axis is too short.

Species area ratios are meaningless: smaller areas way outperform larger areas. So Cape Town with 3250 spp of plants in 2460 km2 so a ratio of 1.32: Tokai Park has 500 indigenous plant species in 600ha, so 833. Species area ratios are only meaningful for a comparison of sites with similar sized areas.

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@egordon88

I agree that the Pacific Coast states (California, Oregon, Washington) probably have higher diversity than the NatureServe list indicates, given they have the extremely speciose temperate rainforests within their borders and California has a high degree of biome variation between the chaparral, the temperate rainforests, the Sonora and Mojave deserts, the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains, as well as the high rates of endemism.

Nevertheless, it seems pretty clear that the states of the far interior entirely east of the Cascades and north of the highly diverse Sonora/Mojave/Chihuahua region (that is, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and to a lesser degree Utah, Nevada, and Colorado) are the least biodiverse region of the United States. This is entirely consistent with the patterns biologists in general have noted in nature, specifically…

  • Regions that are colder or have winter frost are less biodiverse. Any organism that cannot survive a winter frost is barred from the region, and most life on earth is poikilothermic and thus does poorly in cooler temperatures (to a point).
  • Regions with more precipitation are more biodiverse. More precipitation usually means more plant growth and more biomass, and lack of access to water can constrain what animals live where (e.g., odonates, amphibians).
  • Freshwater diversity decreases the farther upstream one goes. This is because obligately aquatic freshwater taxa disperse in a linear fashion along a river during chance events like floods or a river jumping its banks much like ships through locks in a canal. The further upstream one goes, the more likely there will be some barrier impeding the taxon that it has not yet had the opportunity to cross.
  • Diversity is also positively reinforcing. Higher diversities of vascular plants will result in higher insect diversity because nearly every plant has multiple epibionts/parasites, etc., and many animals have their own specialized parasites (e.g., ichneumonoid wasps). Even at larger sizes, more prey means more niches for predators.

You mention bees show higher diversity in the Western U.S. but even the study that found this pattern said the high biodiversity in temperate arid regions was an unusual exception, not the rule, and even within the context of the western U.S. Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas seemingly have fewer bee species than the eastern United States (see Figure 6 of that study).

The NatureServe list is, of course, incomplete, but it is a useful proxy for testing this hypothesis given we do not have perfect data for all organisms. This pattern could be overturned with greater sampling, but at the same time there is a pattern and that pattern may remain the same even with further sampling. In science it is necessary to back up conclusions with actual data and numbers (or qualitative information), it is not possible to throw up our hands and say “all regions have the same biodiversity” without proof to support this idea.

You mention the high diversity of California, but California is also huge, and thus its high number of species could be attributable to simply sampling more area. What matters is the density of species within a comparable area. And I think it’s fair to say even within California, a representative transect of Death Valley National Park is going to have less biodiversity than the same-sized transect of northern California. Alternatively, if one sampled a California-sized chunk of the East Coast, would the diversity be the same? Additionally, as I mentioned above, when I am talking about the low diversity of western states, I am specifically talking about those east of the Pacific Coast and north of Arizona and New Mexico, primarily the northern Rockies and Dakotas. California is clearly very biodiverse.

And this is the broader point I am trying to make, Species are not evenly distributed in nature. This is something that scientists have observed since the 1830s at least. If they were evenly distributed conservationists wouldn’t be so concerned about the preservation of the coral reefs or rainforests. If one lives in, say, Boise, Idaho or Omaha, Nebraska, the potential number of species one could observe within a 1-day potential driving distance are going to be much lower than if they live in, say, Sacramento, California, Portland, Oregon, or Birmingham, Alabama. Beating one’s self up for not producing as many distinct observations per day as the site’s most prolific observers is unreasonable, because some of that is affected by where one lives (e.g., degree of anthropogenic impacts and urbanization, access to transportation, and available biodiversity that can be sampled within the local area).

@tonyrebelo

Species area ratios are meaningless: smaller areas way outperform larger areas…Species area ratios are only meaningful for a comparison of sites with similar sized areas.

And this is the point I am trying to make. Geographic areas are not equal in terms of species diversity. Some areas tend to be densely packed with species and in others species are very sparse and local ecosystems consist of the same handful of species spread over a very broad geographic range. It’s not reasonable to make direct comparisons on the relative biodiversity of, say, Wyoming versus Tennessee, because the former is 2.5 times the size of the latter.

Though interestingly, if comparisons are restricted to states the same size, Missouri has 1.8 times the number of species in the NatureServe list as North Dakota, despite both being ~178,000 km^2. Or, to look at it another way, Pennsylvania and Wyoming have comparable species diversities (~3150-3200) despite Wyoming being 2.5 times as large.

More broadly, as you say the Cape Flora province is hyperdiverse. I would not go outside and expect to document the same number of plant species as are present in the Cape.

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At some point in my childhood I figured that out: that the wonderful creatures in my beloved books were not going to show up in my neighborhood. That was what got me interested in travel, and in biogeography.

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and iNaturalist?

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This was way before there was an internet.

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You do realize that we are a dying breed! Soon no one will remember what a world without internet was like.

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Or a world in which many of your photos are on translucent slides in a cardboard box in your closet.

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Luckily iNat is drawing digital natives to bridge the gap to the dinosaurs who remember before.

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