Canada - iNaturalist World Tour
Canada is the third stop on the iNaturalist World Tour with over 1 Million observations. iNaturalist.ca became part of the iNaturalist Network in 2015 through the efforts of the Canadian Wildlife Federation, Royal Ontario Museum, Parks Canada and NatureServe Canada. @jpage_cwf deserves huge credit leading coordination of this effort. Like the United States, most of the top observers in Canada are based on the east or west coasts.
Canada is even more seasonal than the United States with observations peaking in July each year.
The distribution of observations across species groups is similar to the the United States with slightly more mammals than herps which also makes sense given the higher latitudes.
We’ll be back tomorrow with Australia!
@owenclarkin @jem9redwood @nanorca13 @johndreynolds @swampy @xyz @wdvanhem @gwynethgovers @alwoodhouse @danavan
Comments
Is there an easy way to make the user maps zoomable? Since Canada's population is so concentrated in that corner, a bunch of the users were hard to see too
Breakdown of top 50 species:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6712&subview=table&view=species
Birds 25 species, 11 plants, 7 herps, 5 mammals, 2 insects, . Fairly typical so far - still no Fungi.
And 2 aliens are listed in the top 50 species.
I had expected it to be more similar to the USA in composition - both aliens are shared.
@tonyrebelo - just curious what criteria you are using for your search, I see 2 non natives in the top 50 (still pretty good) - House Sparrow and Common Dandelion and the highest fungus is about 75th when I query.
it's ok each dandelion is an individual microspecies so really they shouldn't be listed so high :)
Sorry: recomputing!!
Done and edited.
Hey, that’s me! Though it’s hard to see most people through the Southern Ontario crowding, as I expected. I wonder what the map would look like if us Ontarians were excluded, to even the game somewhat.
we had talked in the US page of doing a state by state breakout some other time, a province one would be equally neat (as well as equivalent areas for other countries with high usage such as Mexico and Australia)
We got a national project here in Mexico, I think we will need something similar by country may be:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/biodiversidad-de-mexico
@tonyrebelo 'I had expected it to be more similar to the USA in composition' - just curious what part of the differences surprised you ?
I expected a fair bit of overlap in especially birds, but also plants. Remember these are the common species: widespread and abundant and easily photographed and popular. At 21 species out of 50 shared between USA & Canada, I suppose I should me most satisfied with my presumption.
I am willing to bet it will be two most similar countries in terms of shared top 50 species, within the top 20 countries, although Spain-Portugal might be close?
I think a good amount of the difference comes from the concentration of US users in either California or Texas, those are obviously a long ways from Canada and very different biomes. Most of the plants that are in Canada's top 50 list are trees, which is not the case for the US, that comes from a significant part of the year really the only plants available to document in much of Canada are trees (if you want to practice ID'ing bare trees by their bark).
The Canadian bird list is dominated by species that are in the populated areas of the country year round, which is why there are more ducks etc. Many of the songbirds winter down south and breed further north than the population centres of southern Ontario, which means we see them in the spring and fall for a few weeks as they migrate.
Insects are lot less prelvalent simply due to the climate. I live in the area of the country (the big geographic cluster of observers) where we get the warmest summers. But even now with it being almost June, we still have insect species that have not yet emerged, and when they do, their flight seasons will be measured in weeks. Our insect viewing season is realistically May to September, yes there are a few on both sides of that, but the diversity gets low quickly. Not too many insects (or fungi, herps, mammals or flowering plants for that matter) around when it is minus 20 here.
New England and southern Ontario/Quebec are quite similar.
Just checking: we know where the observers are based, but where are the top IDentifiers from?
6: USA (fungi, herps, mammals, others, arachnids, molluscs),
3: Ontario, &
New Brunswick.
Like Mexico, Canada is dominated by USA identifiers, although 1 of Mexicos 6 external identifiers was from Europe.
You did not really ask the question in this post as has become the norm on the later nations, but in terms of driving use in Canada, the #1 thing to my mind would be figuring out how to gain traction in Quebec. It is the 2nd largest province in terms of population, but barely registers in terms of observations, and a good chunk of the ones that are there come from people visiting.
To put in perspective:
Ontario - population 13.5 million -> 706,000 verifiable records
Quebec - population 8.2 million -> 64,000 verifiable records
The site is fully translated into French, so that should not be a barrier, but something seems to be really limiting uptake.
interesting observation cmcheatle. I'm looping in some top identifiers from Quebec @bachandy @danavan @birderbb @ludoleclerc @nickbedard. Does anyone have any ideas for outreach in Quebec?
My guess is you'd have more success if you made a different portal than the rest of Canada.
I've tried several times to bring people up to INat. I think they are just not that aware of the existence of the application and the website. Maybe were a little late on that compared to the rest of the world!!
Excellent point about the use in Quebec lagging behind considerably @cmcheatle. @loarie I think there are a couple of reasons, mostly related to awareness. Many folks are using iNat.org within Canada as opposed to iNat.ca, which means that people don't see or know that it's bilingual. iNat.org has had huge success so the press, communications and media attention have predominantly all been in English. This gets pick up in Canada as well and the English reports are then circulated. So my guess is that French speakers just haven't heard about it enough yet. I/we at iNat.ca have to do a better job at reaching out to Quebec residents (me being one of them!), and media outlets. An added boost in Ontario and BC is that the provincial parks in both those provinces are promoting it to the park visitors, of which there are many.
Hi - Not sure if the algorithm used to map User has too high a threshold to show only BC and ON-QC is high use areas. They are the most densely populated areas in Canada, so not a surprise. I think showing areas as a percentage of the population would be more interesting!
Also why is the text on Canada comparing us to the US all the time? Other country's text does not follow this framework. The Belgium text is not all about France, or New Zealand all about Australia.
I'm not sure I see anything 'wrong' with the map display, it shows where the people who have contributed the most records to the site are located. i can't think of a reason why a person in Toronto or Vancouver has a different opportunity or an easier task than a person in Regina or Charlottetown to create 5,000 records or whatever the cutoff is to make the top 50 observers list in Canada is.
I still find it funny that we have so many top 50 observers in Southern Ontario that the map spills some of us into the States
Hi @suzanne_carriere - the user map shows the top 50 observers. I agree other visualizations and figures would be cool. Re: why this post mentions the US - probably because it was just the third post after the US and MX so I was using those posts for context. I've now written around 40 of these so the tone of the posts has changed a bit as I've gotten more used to the format.
Does the identifiers graphic update monthly, like the map graphic?
yes - these were updated yesterday to include August 2019 data
Where are the leaderboards for Canadian Observers?
If the default Canadian site does not give you joy (sorry: we are not a community yet, so I dont know how that works) then try this:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6712&subview=grid&view=observers
(you can add dates or groups (e.g. birds, plants) to the filter if you want)
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