Do you live in a magical land full of iNaturalist aficionados, or, instead, a vast cultural wasteland? Surely there is no in-between!
Perhaps you already know the answer to this question. But - what better place than the Internet to compare your lot in life to that of others?
And so - for your viewing pleasure on this cold winter evening - I have compiled the number of verifiable calendar year 2024 iNat observations per state, grabbed 2024 U.S. Census Bureau population data, and smashed them together in this nifty map.
Good people of Vermont, you appear to be relatively well-stocked with cameras, time, and a desire to share what you saw outside!
I encourage the rest of us to catch up with them by submitting well-cropped, in-focus, excellently-documented submissions while those New Englanders are house-bound through mid-April (or whatever it is that happens up there)!
Or maybe being housebound is what gives them time to upload all their photos?
It’d be fun - but somewhat labor intensive - to do a county-by-county breakdown!
I was surprised by the strength of the Mountain West. The other popular areas - West Coast, New England, the broad D.C. region - those I kind of expected.
I wonder how much vacationers have an impact on the numbers.
Super cool! This made me curious so I went ahead and did a rough calculation for Canada and it seems all provinces/territories have at least 0.2 observations per capita, so not bad.
Ontario - 0.47
Quebec - 0.20
BC - 0.82
Alberta - 0.22 (surprisingly low?)
Sask - 0.21
Manitoba - 0.29
PEI - 0.83
NS - 1.01
NB - 0.55
NL - 0.24 (map boundaries weren’t set so I estimated obs numbers)
NWT - 0.58 (ditto)
Yukon - 3.21 (wow!)
Nunavut - 0.44
EDIT: oops, I didn’t realize the post was specifically about 2024 obs numbers, LOL
I was thinking about including Canada on the map, but in the end decided not to. There’s such dramatic variability in the population sizes of the Canadian regions!
I’ll update the Newfoundland/Labrador numbers as soon as I remember the work-around for the map boundaries issue. Edit: added them. (Have to input that location at the top bar on the browser and hit “View observations,” instead of just using the “Observations” bar).
It’d probably also be cool to do it for each year, and see how the comparative popularity of iNat has spread over time, but I don’t have the patience for that.
Oh, very cool visualization! You’re giving me ideas for my area and seeing how it could be used as a guide to look for potentially less observed areas.
I’m working on a rough first draft for France - I’m looking to make a similar one for Europe but I’m struggling to get all the numbers for roughly consistent bit of areas, since every country does it differently
@comradejon I don’t know if it’s been the same for you, but i’ve found the numbers quite surprising. France has a lot less observation per capita than both the US and Canada, now i’m curious to see how many users there are in France and if that has an influence
edit: on second thought, won’t hijack your subject, I’ll make my own post later ;)
County-by-county would be interesting for PA… as a resident of one of the flyover counties, I’d bet that the cities are actually dragging down our state-wide numbers by being so heavily populated. I’d guess the Philly- and Pittsburgh-area counties are much pinker than counties like Bucks and Centre.
Actually, that might be a common theme in many states… the cities are quite pink, notwithstanding the thousands of robins and dandelions around high schools. Non-metro counties with big colleges - like Penn State in Centre county - could be pretty green. I wouldn’t be surprised if your greenest counties were more rural - there’s more to see out here, and fewer people in your way.
I agree–in south/central New York, I think the number & placement of iNat observations isn’t driven as much by strict population density as college impact. In 2024, Tompkins Co. (home of Cornell University, pop. ~26,000 students and a lot of extension and outreach activity, as well as 2 other colleges) had 53,648 obs for a population of 105,740 (2020) while Broome Co. (home of Binghamton University, pop. ~18,000 students and some recent outreach activity, plus 1 other college) had 10,196 obs for a population of 198,683 (2020).
That works out to 0.51 obs/capita in Tompkins Co. vs. 0.05 obs/capita in Broome Co.
this or another of the examples in this thread could be adapted to make a chroropleth, though you would need to find a source for a European map: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/some-choropleth-maps-using-inat-data/21776/9. or a quick web search turns up many pages that can handle the visualization given user data or provides the country boundaries.
The Vermont Atlas of Life (see https://val.vtecostudies.org/) has spent a lot of time over the last decade plus recruiting and encouraging folks to add data to iNaturalist (and other projects we support like eBird Vermont and e-Butterfly) to add to our ever-growing atlas. In fact, we completed a 10-yr Anniversary report (https://val.vtecostudies.org/val-reports/) where we show how Vermont leads in per capita for community science data. We are blessed with more naturalists and outdoors people per hectare than perhaps most places! Super thankful to all of you!
Edit: had screwed up the data upload in the first map, every row was moved by one so nothing was right, thanks @ShotShot for pointing it out. Now it should all be ok - but please point it out if there’s a mistake! (I’m here to learn, whether it’s about nature or tech, whichever will bite me first)
Full numbers, in ascending order of Observation per Capita
And here’s a link where you should be able to hover over the county in the map and get its name ( pretty cool! ): https://www.datawrapper.de/_/HC7eo/
The dominance of the Yukon ratio at the top of the “leaderboard” is almost certainly due to the efforts of previous Yukon Conservation Data Centre Coordinator Bruce Bennett in encouraging as many residents and visitors to use the app as possible. @comradejon Do you mind if I share the numbers from the Canadian calculations with a few colleagues to highlight the role of iNaturalist in raising biodiversity awareness?
for my area and seeing how it could be used as a guide to look for potentially less observed areas.
Non-metro counties with big colleges - like Penn State in Centre county - could be pretty green. I wouldn’t be surprised if your greenest counties were more rural - there’s more to see out here, and fewer people in your way. 
