Anyone who wanted to waste their time uploading–and the identifiers’ time identifying–could clock 1,000, or even 2,000 observations in the same day if they don’t care about a high species count.
How? You photograph a cluster of aphids on a plant or ants on an anthill (later that week) cut out and post photos of each individual that is reasonably in focus. You can do the same with a flock of birds and, as matthewvosper mentioned, photograph each wildflower in a meadow – or each dandelion at a park.
But why encourage this waste of time and storage space?
Looking at it in the map view is also very interesting, the region of observation makes an almost perfect rectangle. I hope these observations were comissioned because the more one looks at them, the more painstaking the activity appears!
Well, it’s not me, I doubt I’ll ever get near 1000 observations a day so I won’t even try to ‘compete’ on this. But if I dedicate myself to do nothing but observing for a day I may manage 1000 pictures to upload from one day. That seems doable for me but won’t translate to observation numbers as I often use multiple pictures per observation. My own personal record appears to be during the most recent City Nature Challenge with 767 pictures in 267 obs one day, and 624 pictures in 242 obs the next day.
I don’t really get what you’re trying to say here, why there should be any context about it? If it’s a record and done within the rules, it’s very interesting and becomes a level, plank, that other users can see as their future goal or compare their results and think if they can or can’t do better, or just can be interested in that information as in any achievement.
Yeah, that seems to be a decent number for me, too. So far I’ve had 24 days with more than 50 observations during my ‘iNat career’ usually in connection with some sort of challenge/project/BioBlitz event. Out of these, only 3 days got above 100, and two out of those (the ones I mentioned above for the recent City Nature Challenge) over 200. A more typical outcome of a more casual “I went iNatting around the woods” hike for me is somewhere around 30 observations from the hike.
it seems strange to me that folks would want to see numbers just to see numbers. my first post in this thread was to say that robotpie seemed to have a point that number of taxa might be a better reflection of the spirit of iNat than simply number of observations. so maybe that’s the kind of metric that we should pay more attention to?
anyway, below are the folks with the most distinct taxa in a day, based on that old copy of the AWS Open Data Set (from 2021-04-15). note that this is a simple distinct taxon count, not a count of “leaf taxa” that some of the iNat pages show. @yayemaster might be interested to see who shows up on this list.
seems like you’re one of the few to have achieved that.
SELECT observer_id, observed_on, COUNT(DISTINCT taxon_id) as taxon_count, COUNT(*) obs_count
FROM observations
GROUP BY observer_id, observed_on
ORDER BY COUNT(DISTINCT taxon_id) DESC
LIMIT 10
I think this is definitely an opinion on doing stuff like that, but part of iNaturalist is that everybody can use it in their own way. For example, I know of an account that only observes cats and another that only observes one type of bird. I don’t do that on my account but I appreciate that others are using their accounts in the way they like to. I don’t think anything would be a waste of time or a waste of storage space unless they’re violating the community guidelines. Diversity and differing stances is part of what makes the site special and very importantly, accessible, to a wide variety of people. I think there should be no shame in using the site how you want to use it.
My big day was 121 obs with 94 taxa. It was during the Snapshot CalCoast 2022 on June 22 at Pillar Point beaches. Overall, I got 509 obs with 162 species for the project.
That appears to be an artifact of a lot of those observations being obscured. The actual path/trail walked is well outlined within that rectangle by the non-obscured observations from that day though, illustrating how easy it is to extrapolate locations on obscured observations in cases like this.
It might be fun one of these days to “go big” on one of my photo outings and document an example of every living organism I can find. Wonder if I have the stamina to do that though. Or the time to upload all those records.
I’m currently in a national cactus/agave competition and did 667 observations, 113 species for that day: Jul 25th Observations
It was an intense day drove just over 600km in total, and spent 14 hours non-stop observing different habitats to get the most species and observations. The end result was exhaustion, but the good kind :)
Looks like my personal best was 402 observations of 162 taxa, in May of this year actually. I didn’t much feel like doing the city nature challenge 2022 because I’d lost a beloved pet a few days before, so I set myself my own personal challenge on a later day.
A more usual day for me is between 50 and 250 observations.
I’ve done this a few times, and it’s actually really fun. I find myself noticing things I would have usually overlooked - in fact, it’s helped me to record a couple of species that were new to iNat.
I’ve thought of doing that in my home/backyard one day just out of curiosity how many species I can find, excluding anything captive/cultivated of course.
How would you search for that without long calendar check? I see at July 28 I had 664 observations, but have no idea if it’s the best day or not, should be as I tried to photograph more of the same plant species on my way.
There is a difference between the number of observations that are mapped to a single day, and the number observations that were created on that day.
My biggest day (434 observations of 242 species) happened because I had set out a number of moth traps, and sorted through the catch over the winter, and posted them over time, but all observations were pegged to the day of collection.
As always, amazing data pisum, thank you for pulling together.
biobank-lantauhk’s data are really remarkable! They have 8,605 observations total, and the two dates in your table (2017-07-26 & 2018-06-05) sum to 5,957 observations, meaning that 69% of their total observation count occurred in two days. Given the large gap between their top two days and what anyone else has been able to achieve, I almost wonder if there’s an error in the data. If true, both days were spectacular feats.
