The Spring Bump and Overall iNat Growth

Numbers! Sure, they don’t have feathers, fangs, or pseudopodia, but they can be pretty cool. Taking a look at our Stats page, you can see that iNat is experiencing our yearly “spring bump,” coinciding with spring in the northern hemisphere (which came early this year) and the explosion of flowers, insects, reptiles, etc. But you can also see an overall trend in total growth of about 100%. In fact, March 27th was our biggest day of overall traffic ever, and right now we’re recording over twice as many observations compared to the same dates last year (e.g. 29,172 on March 27th (A), 2016 vs 71,005 on March 27th, 2016 (B)). 

With twice the amount of observations, you’d expect to see a similar change in active user numbers, and comparing March 27th, 2016 (A) and March 27th, 2017 (B), that’s almost exactly what’s happened - 7,387 vs 14,440, and climbing steadily this year. Even the slowest day in the doldrums of winter has doubled, from 4,024 to 8,064. Users are also increasingly turning to mobile platforms - iOS observations are up 250% over this time last year, and Android observations are up 600%!

What’s cool is that the quality of observations and community engagement has also been increasing, along with quantity; research grade observations now make up a higher percentage of overall observations. Right now we have about 4.8 million verifiable observations, about 2.4 million of which are research grade. A year ago, of the 2.3 million verifiable observations, 1.1 million were research grade, so the ratio of research grade to total observations is becoming more favorable. Keep on using the Identify page to ID more observations!

All told, iNaturalist should be hitting 4 million verifiable observations (and 5 million total) in the next few weeks and, if trends continue, it’s possible we’ll be at 10 million total observations in about another year.

A big thank you to everyone for making iNat a vibrant, growing community, we’re looking to see more big numbers in the upcoming City Nature Challenge!

- Tony Iwane (with lots of data help from Patrick Leary)

Posted on March 31, 2017 05:08 AM by tiwane tiwane

Comments

Beautiful numbers! :)

Hoping that more folks will actively use the identify page with all of this observational growth as well. It's filterable and fun. ;)

Posted by sambiology almost 7 years ago

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