The genus Achlys is a “Pacific Rim” taxon, that is, one which has species in western North America and eastern Asia. But you’d never know it from the observations map:
The red circle indicated where I would have expected to see observations of Achlys japonica, which, surprisingly, has no observations. Surprisingly, considering that there are currently 75,779 plant observations in Japan, so that the map is completely filled in with red:
Hokkaido, the main stronghold of Achlys japonica, has 3,576 plant observations, comprising 785 species. The Japanese common name for the species is Nanbu-so, in which “Nanbu” refers to the southern part of Iwate Prefecture on Honshu. I note that Iwate has 459 plant observations of 299 species.
Considering how abundant the North American Achlys are within their range – in some areas, they are the dominant understory herb – it surprises me that the Asian species has never been observed. Is it really that much rarer? It should certainly be conspicuous enough to be noticed.
Japan seems to have much less iNat activity compared to other places. Japan has roughly the same land area as California and 3x the population, but only 1/40 of the number of total observations.
I wonder if there is another nature-observation-sharing network that is popular in Japan?
That was sort of my point - iNaturalist has not become popular in Japan in the same way it has in California (and many other places), thus fewer observers, thus lower potential for observations of Achlys japonica to appear in the iNat database.
In East and SE Asia as a whole it’s not very popular. There’s a core group of people here who use it, but it’s a small percentage of society. It’s even a small percent of the people interested in and working in biodiversity related fields here. It’s largely unknown.
This is very much my experience in South Korea. There are local apps/websites that fill a similar niche to iNaturalist so if someone goes to Naver or Daum (much more popular than Google in Korea) and searches in Korean for related keywords they’re more likely going to find, and choose, Naturing or Moyamo over iNaturalist. There are a large number of fish observations posted to Naturing whereas there are very few Korean fish posted to iNaturalist, for example.
Also somewhat related, what’s ‘impossible to miss’ for one person might not be for another. We each have our own perspectives, goals, backgrounds, and biases.
It’s definitely that way for experts worldwide, e.g. mycologists avoid iNat, I know bat people do that too, so you need either an active professor or majority of active students using it to push the narrative that it’s ok.
I’ve been to a few conferences where students in the region have presented papers using iNat data.
If anything, I think academics and students here are the group that is most likely to be using iNat.
One of the big differences in iNat use is, I think, in part due to the different relationship with nature that’s seen in large parts this region. For many people nature is seen as a resource to be used, and something of an annoyance, except for in special designated areas. Doing biodiversity conservation work here in Vietnam that’s one of the things that I see often, and friends working in Cambodia, Laos, and Indonesia report similar findings.
There is also the issue of free time, many people here don’t have time and access, even if they did have the interest.
The necessary tools are another issue. I work with a lot of rural village level folks. Most of them don’t have computers and many of them are still using candybar phones and flip-phones, not smartphones.
Language is another barrier. There is no Vietnamese language iNat option, and the same is true for some of the other regional languages. If it’s not available in the local language then even if someone is interested in it they’ll find it prohibitively difficult to use.
Obviously there is no one reason, but instead a combination of factors.
Yeah, unfortunately the iNat community in Japan is pretty small, which I’m bummed about as I’m part Japanese. I’m sure a big reason for that is translation (both the mobile apps and website are just a hair over 50% translated into Japanese), among many other factors. But in most cases iNat growth in an area really depends on enthusiastic, influential, dedicated people (or a person) in an area that’s able to get something going. It’s a lot of work, and humbling that people will spend so much time on it.
If you’re interested, here’s a talk by Cheng-Tao Lin (mutolisp on iNat) covering how he helped to build the iNat community in Taiwan: https://youtu.be/moWPNPuzq4E
I’m a foreigner in Japan (Okinawa) and despite a huge community of nature enthusiasts here (particularly divers) and despite Okinawa prefecture being the subtropical and coral reef playground for a 125M nation, Okinawa has just ~22k observations (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=13082). I have plans to run a small workshop at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, where I work, to promote iNat but this will again mostly appeal to foreigner community. I think https://www.inaturalist.jp customized for Japanese to create the sense of a community and enthusiastic Japanese influencer(s) will be crucial to break the ice.
A lot of them don’t even know iNat exists, so there is an immediate bottleneck right there, and of the ones who do I don’t know any of them who would be willing to, or can, commit the time necessary to translate all of iNat into Vietnamese.
It’s one of those things that should happen though.
In all honesty, maybe it’s a good thing iNat is not more widespread, at least in Vietnam, as wildlife poaching is rampant. Dealing with wildlife and plant poaching just on the local level occupies a significant portion of our resources and time any my little NGO.
Yeah, I’m talking about those who already joined iNat as I checked ad quite a few people have more than a thousand observations (and for example first one in Vietnam is @vietanhnguyen and has 6 thousands observations and for Thailand it’s @luluchouette with more than 8), so maybe a community post of some kind can be written, as basic translations are not very hard to do and they already would be of a great help for locals to start joining. Though of course some level of bio-knowledge and responsibility are needed.
Viet Anh was one of my employees and I introduced him to iNaturalist.
We discussed the need for a Vietnamese language version of iNat a few times, but that’s as far is it went, and both in the position at my organization, and in the organization he is in now the time to do the translation is an issue.
The observer in Vietnam with the second most observations is also an employee of mine, and again I’m the one who introduced him to iNat.
The rest of the top observers for Vietnam (with the possible exception of Budak, who I don’t know) are all foreigners, many of whom don’t live here, they’ve come to work periodically on projects and then left.
The next for certain Vietnamese observer in spot 11 is also one of my employees, and again I introduced him to iNat.
Depends on what it is that is being poached, but it can help. Thing is that poachers here are persistent. It’s not the poaching most people think of when they think of poaching (eg. hunting rhinos and elephants and stuff), it’s the far more common and widespread daily and seasonal poaching of small animals (bushmeat, pet trade, and traditional medicines) and plants (traditional medicine, and ornamental plants).
People know the habitat preferences of these organisms and will spend a week or so in the jungle at a time, so even an obscured location doesn’t help all that much for this sort of poaching, and it makes conservation work more difficult too.
many of them know at least general/likely species locations already without iNat
Absolutely the case, in fact I often rely on my team of ex-poachers for habitat information for specific species. This often takes some effort to extract as you have to know what sort of questions will be understood by local folks.
It’s an interesting question that could even be studied, to estimate what if any percent of the problem could be being contributed to by citizen science portals like iNat (including at different or projected future user base sizes). Also to estimate/test what it would be if many or all observers used obscured coordinates. Then it if the problem still would persist, to estimate/test the effect making locations private.
That would be interesting, but also impractical, and one of those sorts of experiments that could wind up resulting in species extinctions, not just local extinctions, so it’s a questionable proposition.
Sometimes I wish there was a tiered system in iNat. Level 1 is general users, and Level 2 is those who can prove that they are “responsible” in some way (eg. conservation workers, certain researchers, etc). Level 1 sees the normal interface and Level 2 doesn’t have locations obscured.
That won’t happen, and it’s probably a good thing that it doesn’t, but there are certain situations (eg. locally endemic species that may have wider populations than are actually known) where it would be extremely valuable.
Not sure how the convo veered to Vietnam, but okay. Of course, different countries will have different customs. There are several wildflower blogs in Japanese, as well as more general nature blogs in which some entries are about wildflowers For example: https://sapporo-nature-times.com/jouzankei-tengudake/. You can right-click on it and select translate from the menu that appears if you want to get an idea of what it says.
