I did not visit Belarus in 2020 due to corona and not after 2020 due to geopolitical reasons.
Visit Belarus often before 2018
Botanist in Belarus are kind, normal people. You just have to behave…(do not sing in metro stations)
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Lots of helpful thoughts here, thanks everyone. To try and summarize, it seems like:
- The decline in Moldova in 2022 might be related to the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022 (@insectobserver123), and/or the overall small number of observations (@pisum).
- The decline in Belarus in 2021 might be related to the spike in contributions in 2020 (@pisum; also neat to see that “comparison” GUI on iNat, I didn’t know that existed). That spike in 2020 might have itself been due to field courses going online as a result of lockdown, and power users from those field courses uploading lots of observations at that time (@jurga_li, @dgwdoesthings). Other countries of course also experienced lockdowns at this time and didn’t see a spike but perhaps these field courses are particularly common in Belarus?
Some other interesting ideas about the impact of arrests of scientists/shuttering of environmental NGOs in Belarus, though I wasn’t sure these lined up exactly with the year that observations declined. Other thoughts on the gas shut-off to Belarus, but I think that happened quite recently, right? Changes in tourism might also be important as others point out but I’m not sure if those changes would necessarily be restricted to the specific yearly declines I’m interested in above.
there’s no evidence that this was done more than once. with a high enough average number of observations per student, it doesn’t take that many students to create significant spike. you can’t then extrapolate and say that a spike means that field courses are common or not.
If pandemic-related impacts on field courses are the cause of this decline in Belarus, and other countries also experienced the pandemic and have field courses, then there would have to be some unique dimension of these field courses that is specific to Belarus that would cause a decline in Belarus and not the other countries. I was just speculating as to what those unique dimensions might be (e.g. perhaps they are more common, or represent a higher proportion of the total observation pool than in other countries).
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why would there have to be some unique dimension? a single random spike is a single random spike. i could go out tomorrow and organize a bioblitz that added an additional 20,000 observations in my area. that doesn’t say anything other than that someone organized a bioblitz in my area in that time period.
look at the data. don’t just speculate. just because a country has a pandemic doesn’t mean field course go online. just because field courses go online doesn’t mean they add iNaturalist observations. just because online field courses use iNat one year doesn’t mean they have to repeat every year.
If I’m understanding your argument correctly, you are saying that the spike in observation in Belarus in that year is due to random noise in the data, rather than some underlying cause. Is that right?
That could well be the case, but I think an alternative scenario is also possible; that there is some underlying cause. Hence, what started this particular thread (“perhaps these field courses are particularly common in Belarus”). In fact, you hypothesize an interesting additional possible cause (a single user organizing a large bioblitz that year). That’s the kind of thing I’m interested in, and why I posed this question to the community, which I thought might have specific insight about factors that could have affected participation in iNaturalist in these countries (which turned out to be true! Lots of interesting thoughts in the thread above).
I’m not sure what iNaturalist data would indicate presence/absence of field programs in other countries, but if you have insight on that I’d be glad to hear it.
I have to say, the tone here feels unnecessarily confrontational. We’re all friends here :)
please tell me why you chose to focus on Belarus and Moldova?
you said you were looking at Europe, and 2 declines that you noted were the ones you couldn’t explain.
so then how did you explain the other declines in the same period?
- Belgium declined in both 2021 and 2022
- Kosovo declined in 2021
- Finland declined in 2021
- Denmark declined in 2022
- etc…
I’m investigating the ten Eastern European countries in particular, as part of a time series analysis on the effects of war in Ukraine. Those instances I mentioned are the only instances of a country in Eastern Europe, besides Ukraine, experiencing appreciable declines in contributions from 2018-2023 (annualized around the date of the full-scale invasion).
I don’t know what, if anything, explains declines in those other countries you mentioned but that would be an interesting question worth investigating too.
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why? and which are the 10 countries you define as being "Eastern European countries?
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