I recently listened to a fascinating podcast about the naturalist community in Japan, specifically about entomology. However, when I look at iNaturalist statistics for Japan, there appear to be very few observations/observers/identifiers given the population and level of development. I’m wondering…

In cases like this my immediate thought is that they’re likely using another platform (like observation.org in Europe). The only one I can find with a quick search is “ Biome ”, which does seem pretty popular but as far as I can tell it doesn’t have a social aspect that would help a naturalist communi…

Might language be a factor? I don’t know a lot about the history of when iNaturalist became available in different languages, and the degree to which those languages are supported, but I notice that a lot of the countries high in the iNaturalist participation rankings are English- or Spanish-speakin…

[image] DanielAustin: Might language be a factor? probably. see: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/can-inaturalist-japan-be-created/35163/3 https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000194744-can-i-help-translate-inaturalist- https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/introduction-to…

Another link, from 2019 - travel the world with iNat https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/japan-inaturalist-world-tour/5234

Japan is famously selective in its uptake of foreign culture, so things that are popular in Europe or the US are often not popular there. English mastery is also not especially common. For what it’s worth, the graph seems to me to show that iNat’s popularity correlates with Euro-American cultural i…

Does anyone know if these other citizen science apps feed data to GBIF? If so, we could test whether these other apps explain the difference in iNat observations…

[image] Seems like there are no popular local alternatives, or at least none which feed into GBIF (Per: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/charts?country=JP&occurrence_status=present )

This has also been my question for a while. Although I’ve lived in the US for a long time, I was born and raised in Japan so I knew the nature-loving culture of Japanese people and thought they would love a platform like iNaturalist. But whenever I introduce iNat to my friends in Japan, they think i…

[image] norikonbu: But whenever I introduce iNat to my friends in Japan, they think it’s too technical and intimidating. i wonder if the social interaction part of iNat contributes significantly to that intimidation? i would guess that many normal social interactions in Japan depend a lot abo…

What's up with iNat in Japan?

General

tiwane October 7, 2025, 10:29pm 8

You could probably search for GBIF observations in Japan and see which datasets they come from.

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What's up with iNat in Japan?

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