Romania - iNaturalist World Tour
We're in Romania for the 67th stop on the iNaturalist World Tour! The top observer, @conradaltmann, has observations clustered near Cluj-Napoca, the fourth most populous city in Romania, alongside other top observers such as @ahospers, @vasilestan @felixf and @billboyscout. The second top observer, @ioanamita30 has observations centered around the capital of Bucharest alongside @george_nazareanu who's worked in nature education (Karin's Kids Academy) and museums (Bucharest National Museum of Natural History), @cristinapelcaru, @tseb, and others. @pokeahontas has observations clustered around the Eastern city of Tulcea near the Ukraine border. Several observers such as @izafarr have observations centered in the Southern Carpathian mountains in the center of the country. Several observers such as @andreichiper, @adrian129, @cosmina have observations clustered near the second largest city of Iași in the northeast. @ion_petreus's observations are centered to the north of Cluj-Napoca. @dalien, based in the US has an arc of observations stretching across eastern Romania. @tapaculo99, also based in the US at the University of Wisconsin was in Romania this August and as a result at the time of this writing is in 8th place on the Romania observers leaderboard but doesn't yet appear on the map!
The peak in August 2018 was largely driven by visitors @ahospers and @dalien adding lots of observations. But even ignoring this peak, there was a substantial uptick in the number of observations per month 2018 and again in 2019.
@ldacosta is the top identifier and leads in birds, @borisb leads in insects and @bobwardell leands in plants. @jakob, @amzamz and the mysterious @florinastanescu also top the identifiers leaderboard. Thanks to all the other top identifiers!
What can we do to get more people in Romania involved in iNaturalist? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread
@conradaltmann @ioanamita30 @dalien @george_nazareanu @pokeahontas @ldacosta @jakob @florinastanescu @amzamz @borisb
We’ll be back tomorrow in Nicaragua!
Comments
Scott, Thanks for assembling this analysis! My Earthwise Aware (www.earthwiseaware.org) colleague and good friend @akilee and I were also wondering how we can further stimulate the Citizen Science in Romania. And along with it, iNat as a platform. One way would be to talk more about it when we visit our relatives, get them out in nature, etc. ;-)
I'm working to convince a couple of horticulture professors at the local university to utilize the iNaturalist engine for teaching as well as consolidating their own photographical libraries. Perhaps they can work it into their lessons and projects in the field.
Nice synthesis! National/local NGOs could help a lot by spreading the word regarding iNaturalist, since they work with volunteers; teachers/professors working in Life Sciences could also have a big impact, by using iNaturalist in their field applications with students. Group admins on Facebook should also promote iNaturalist. The majority of citizen scientists are content to just post nice pictures in Facebook groups and obtain an ID; group admins could improve citizen scientists' attitude by explaining how valuable their data can become if shared through iNat. It's a slow process, but we'll get there :)
What a lovely post! Nice synthesis. Next weekend, on 21-22 September 2019, I will be one of the speakers in FIEdu - International Festival of Education, in Ploiesti city, Romania, where will attend over 600 teachers from all over Romania. My presentation is about the benefits of Education in Nature, and a few slides will be dedicated to iNaturalist! Woohoo. This is one starting point to get people involved in this amazing project, iNaturalist being a great tool to use for many people from different domains, in quite many ways. If teachers start using iNaturalist, and present it with passion in activities, the children, students, and their parents will most certainly be curious and intrigued to join, and use iNaturalist at a regular base.
Here is the intro to my presentation, Together inside and out: https://www.facebook.com/fiedu/videos/2387156458193783/
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