Is it a national park? A busy urban core? An acre or two of a dedicated inatter’s property?
Feel free to share a place you think qualifies.
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per square meter, almost certainly, it is someone’s backyard. i’ve seen observers with thousands of observations all at their property.
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I think it depends on how large of an area you’re interested in, if it’s something big I believe it should be somewhere in California. Small ones are hard to predict which one is the densest, my hotpot is here:
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I think national park should have densest amount of observations , but the problem is people would not search that effectively as in small area. for eg:- Since corona virus I am in lockdown and I am eager to find and click photograph of insects ,At morning and evening I search for insect on my small roof then click photograph . But as in national park I would not search that effectively and its also a tedious task , but I am sure there will be densest amount of observations in national park .
It’s also depends on where national park is ,If it is in tropical or sub-tropical area then I guess their will be more density of observation . If that national park is in deserts or at high altitudes then density of obsevation will be less .
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Some numbers:
Golden Gate National Recreation Area in California is the 2nd most visited national park in the US with 12.4 million visitors per year. It has 82,027 acres and 26,677 observations as of May 29, 2021, or 0.325 observations per acre.
Calais, VT, an ordinary small town in Vermont, has 24,644 acres. It has 36,753 observations as of May 29, 2021, or 1.49 observations per acre.
My property in Calais, VT has 12 acres. It has 10602 observations as of May 29, 2021, or 883.5 observations per acre.
I’m sure there are folks out there with smaller properties and more observations on their properties.
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I think the original question is very interesting but it should probably focus on formal public destinations like parks, preserves, refuges, etc. Local yards will certainly have the highest density of observations, but that is misleading since they are heavily biased by observer “density”. For instance, my urban yard is only about 0.5 acre yet I have made something on the order of 10,500 observations here. That calculates to a ridiculous “density” of observations. Here’s a polygon which includes just my own observations around my home on Salton Drive:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=30.41817656704224&nelng=-97.75816235605183&place_id=any&subview=map&swlat=30.417540486879602&swlng=-97.76008013549747&user_id=gcwarbler&verifiable=any
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Just curious, how many species have you found in your half acre?
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For those interested in yard projects, here’s an umbrella project hosting a selection of these (others are welcome!).
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my guess would be that a place like Hong Kong probably would have a ton of observations per square meter.
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Unfortunately, I just converted my old “Salton Drive Biodiversity Project” to a new collection project and for technical reasons lost about 3/4 of the observations.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/salton-drive-biodiversity
That project shows “763 species” but the actually number is on the order of 1,000 to 2,000 spp.
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I guess we should clarify if we use casual obs too, cause lots of Asian planted plants are not marked at all, each time you click on something near botanical garden and it’s planted and there’re 30 obs of the same species nearby, ugh, but if we do count them, it’s gonna be very dense; Taiwan should be pretty high on that list too, on the map both areas look solid red.
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I created an umbrella project for private property, but focused on a specific area and people trying to conserve and restore native habitat, not just any old backyard.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/big-thicket-private-property-umbrella
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I think this brief survey shows pretty clearly that parks of all sizes have plenty more room for observations compared to back yards. So the next logical question is, which parks need more observations? You could use this as a starting point when vacation planning.
Whenever I get ready to go out for a walk, I check the maps to find out which public areas near me have blank spots for observations and go to the closest one.
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In fact all parks need, even those that have lots of observations, always check taxa and mostly there’s a bias based on who were there, it’s either all plants or all birds.
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I guess this is fair. Also dang, that’s a lot of observations.
in case anyone wants to do a quick calculation of observation density for a place (or list of places), i made a page that can get place details, calculate the area of the place polygon stored in iNaturalist, get observation count for the place, and then figure out observation density.
page: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_places.html
code: https://github.com/jumear/stirfry/blob/gh-pages/iNat_places.html
just for example, this will get place density for San Francisco, Hong Kong, and DC:
https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_places.html?place_id=san-francisco-county,district-of-columbia-us,hong-kong&stats=observations,density&verifiable=true. the calculated area will include both land and water. so it will calculate San Francisco’s area as ~600 sq km, which includes ~120 sq km on land and ~480 sq km in the water. that may skew the density figure of a mostly-water place like SF vs a mostly-land place like DC, which is ~180 sq km total, with ~160 sq km on land and ~20 sq km on water.
this page might also offer a quick way to get figures like those in https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/welcome-to-the-club-new-zealand/21711/7.
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I would refine this to: I am sure that the densest observations would be the heavily visited zones of a National Park – the vicinity of the visitor center, the picnic areas, the popular day-hike trails. Meanwhile, the backcountry of that same National Park would have generally sparse observations. This would be so irrespective of climate or altitude.
Unless we’re talking about a place where a mycologist goes. It was infuriating to me to pick a county, and find nearly a dozen pages of nothing but ONE PERSON’s mushroom observations; no other users, no other taxa. I thought that was very inconsiderate – let other people have a turn.
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It’s interesting that what you describe (first part) is represented in “official” science, e.g. herbarium records can be used to show where roads are as they’re located mainly on outskirts of them. I think having iNat meetings could be a solution - multiple people looking for different things at the same place!
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A nice place with quite a lot of observations (59.014) is
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/paco-s-reserva-de-flora-y-fauna in Mexico
I had the chance to visit this place in 2015. It was amazing and Paco (francisco3) is super friendly.
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Mill Ends Park in Portland is 452 square inches. Someone could get an observation in the park and it would have a density of 14,000 observations per acre.
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