I’ve been analyzing trends in iNaturalist participation in Europe, and while most countries have been steadily increasing in observation number every year over the past few years, I’ve noticed two declines that I don’t really know how to explain.
Does anyone familiar with European geopolitics, or familiar with the iNaturalist community in these countries, have a guess for what might explain these declines?
Moldova is in rough shape. No heat, no gas . . . I’ll stay on the topic of iNaturalist, but suffice to say that they have NOT suddenly developed a dislike for biodiversity.
Politics, Economics, and other stuff not related to climate or nature.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and they have been at war ever since. Russia is allied with Belarus and has troops and weapons there. Russia has also indicated a desire to take Moldova, but has been pushed back by Ukrainian forces before reaching Moldova. Moldova also has a Russia-backed separatist region on the Ukraine line
I do not know details of conditions in each country, but I suspect they are affected by the war
i think you need to view these in greater context.
for Belarus, the thing to focus on isn’t why there was a decline in 2021 vs 2020. instead, focus on why there was a spike in 2020.
for Moldova, the number of observations is so low. any variation has to be taken with a grain of salt. even a single tourist making a lot of observations on a vacation could easily skew the numbers.
i think suggesting this sort of path is going to lead folks to the wrong answer.
Pandemic? Lockdown and having free time?
why guess when you can just look at the observations and see exactly what the answer is?
There’s 26k observations at Belaruses peak. Spending 1 second looking at each would take 18.05 hours.
you would think that a peak like that would not be random and that folks would want to organize such a collection of observations somehow…
One can clearly see the impact of “power users”
2019
2020
2021
and the peak in july 2020
Here is some data visualization of that 2020 peak month
2020 spike in Belarus was due to pandemics. Many field courses went partly on-line. Teachers gave tasks to students, students uploaded their observations. I went through many lichen observations from Belarus and most of them were parts of field courses.
Plenty of naturalists and environmentalists have been arrested in Belarus’ crackdowns on civil society, so I’d expect that plays somewhat of a role.
I know a few and here are some news stories from a quick google:
https://prisoners.spring96.org/en/person/viktar-fjanczuk
https://stop-persecution.org/arrest-of-irina-sukhy
https://www.uwc.org/about-uwc/news/alumnus-viktar-fenchuks-arrest-in-belarus
Only the russia-occupied enclave is short on energy after Ukraine cut the russian gas deliveries to the enclave.
The russian occupation authorities there are refusing to accept replacement energy from free Moldova.
Belarus is one of the worlds harshest dictatorships, which cracks down on all forms of spontaneous public organizing, for example environmental orgs. Belarus is also being absorbed by russia, meaning they are behind the russian Great Firewall.
Not sure what the problem would be with Moldova, unless there were some very active reporters in the russia-occupied region of Moldova. It has fallen on hard times after Ukraine cut off russian gas deliveries to it, and the russian occupation authorities are refusing replacement energy from free Moldova because they want to use the humanitarian crisis to force Ukraine to restart gas deliveries.
In some countries, a lot of the observations are probably derived from visiting tourists. I doubt Belarus and Moldova rank very highly on most peoples’ current bucket list.
In addition to all the very viable factors above, I’d like to add that in times of political tension, carrying a camera around and visibly taking photographs can be bad for your health. Heck, it even attracts suspicion from law enforcement sometimes here in California. And a friend of mine was once arrested for “spying” while doing photography in an African nation he was visiting (fortunately he was released after a couple of hours, when the superior officer came on duty and intervened).
Point being, people may feel it’s wise to be more cautious right now.
although the title of the thread is somewhat broad, the actual question posed in the original post is very specific – related to 2 very specific data points.
i fear that when we stray from the very specific cases and try to address general cases, we veer into the land of “lies, damned lies, and statistics”, where you can pick any convenient statistic out of context to justify and support whatever belief you have.
in the interest of keeping things from straying too far, i’d just ask folks to please just keep focus on the 2 specific cases:
Because when someone has the answer to a question it is more efficient to ask them for it than to dig into it yourself, since they clearly know?
I don’t know the answer to the question posed, but I think we sometimes underestimate the proportion of iNat observations that are posted by tourists (in a broad sense, including field researchers and all kinds of people travelling outside of their own country). With the recent political goings-on in Ukraine, I would expect tourism to Belarus and Moldova (at least from the ‘western’ nations where iNat usage is high) has fallen off a cliff. It seems likely to me that this is at least partially the explanation for the decrease.
An example: I am British but I currently top the list for number of observations in Madagascar. It’s a huge country of population 32 million but – as in much of the rest of Africa – iNat is not well known locally. In fact, of the 25 most prolific observers for Madagascar, less than a third are locals. The rest are a mix of ‘expats’ and regular visitors. So were there to be a political situation that resulted in foreigners stopping going to Madagascar, I would expect a significant drop-off in observations even if locals continued posting at their usual rate.
On a somewhat related note, I would suggest that you examine the recent habits of the 10 or 20 most prolific observers for Moldova and Belarus. In countries like that (with relatively low iNat activity), the top handful of observers are typically responsible for a significant chunk of all observations nationally, so it would only take a few of them to move away or cease posting on iNat to result in a measurable drop in observations being posted.
Thank you–I did not know this information.
