Thailand - iNaturalist World Tour
Thailand is the 41st stop on the iNaturalist World Tour. Top observers in Thailand appear to be a mix of full time residents (e.g. @lesday, @nopcoeur, @tonykris) and visitors from other parts of the globe (e.g. @pam-piombino, @lennyworthington, @ahospers ). The top observer, @lesday, has observations centered in Southern Thailand. You can learn more about him in this Observation of the Week post which features one of his many butterfly observations. There are many other top users centered along the beaches of this much visited region. The observations of @pam-piombino, @lennyworthington, @nopcoeur, @jan_fischer_rasmussen and others are centered in Northern and Northeastern Thailand. There is a large cluster of top observers such as @tonykris and @ahospers around the capital of Bangkok. Also check out this Observation of the Week post featuring a Lesser Oriental Chevrotain seen in Thailand by @juddpatterson.
The number of observations per month has been growing steadily in Thailand since 2017. As of July 2019 its passed 3,000 observations per month. Its unclear how much of this growth is from an increase in visitors using iNaturalist as opposed to an increase in use by Thai citizens / resident ex-pats.
@charliev is the top identifier in Thailand and also leads the plant and herp categories. @kokhuitan is the top bird identifier lending expertise from nearby Singapore. The mysterious @noppadon leads insect identifications and @maractwin leads fish identifications. Thanks to other top identifiers such as @rajibmaulick, @nopcoeur, and @juhakinnunen.
What can we do to get more people in Thailand using iNaturalist? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread
@lesday @pam-piombino @lennyworthington @ahospers @nopcoeur @tonykris @charliev @kokhuitan @rajibmaulick @juhakinnunen
We’ll be back tomorrow with the Tanzania!
Comments
Thank you for this valuable summary.
As an amateur natural observer and a newbie in bio-sci, I'm very honored being mentioned and really appreciated. :)
Thank you for updating previous World tour reports with one month from June to July. It seems iNaturalist is growing in many countries. Nice to see that Thailand has grown so much last year. In March 2018 I visited Thailand and the iNat community was certainly small..and now it seem to have tripled in size. Nice!!
Thank you for mentioning me in this very interesting review. These are my personal thoughts, and I may be completely wrong, but there are two main problems in getting more Thai nationals posting on iNat. 1) The English language is only well spoken/understood in Bangkok and tourist areas, in the countryside, very few speak it to any extent. 2) There appears to be a marked reluctance to give locations when Thais post photos on Facebook (I was once soundly rebuked for providing location and date on a photo I posted in one of the groups), so giving those details on iNat would not be acceptable to many observers.
@lesday for the second topic, wildlife trafficking is a big problem here. Only few people are aware of this. Even many people in nat-sci circles here are also tamers (or even sellers). That's why location specifying can be considered a two-edged sword.
(That leads to the first topic. Not only language is the obstruction, the attitude of studying bio-sci here isn't pure academic. So iNat wasn't their first choice.)
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