Egypt is the 97th stop on the iNaturalist World Tour. While there are a few top observers such as @yasminam with observations clustered around the capital of Cairo, most top observers have observations clustered along the red sea. Most of the observations from here are marine (e.g. fish and marine invertebrates). The top observer in Egypt, @lovelyclemmy, has a marine focus and observations up and down the Red Sea along with other top observers such as @nakarb, @vmoser, @seastung, @awaheed, @maridom, @tuenf, @jujurenoult, and @ronald63. You can read more about @nakarb in this Observation of the Week post from Malaysia and more about @seastung this Observation of the Week post from Mozambique. And from Egypt, don't miss this Observation of the week post about a small giant clam seen by from @wernerdegier along the red sea.

There was a peak in observations per month in November 2017 driven by a visit by @nakarb but otherwise the number of observations per month has been slowly increasing since 2018.

The top observation category is fish reflecting all the underwater Red Sea observations and the top identifier overall and for fish is @maractwin. @sammyboy2059 leads in bird IDs and @phelsumas4life leads in 'other animals' (in this case marine invertebrates). Other top identifiers include @karimhaddad, @kemper, and @khaledayyach

What can we do to get more people in Egypt using iNaturalist? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread.

@lovelyclemmy @nakarb @vmoser @seastung @awaheed @maractwin @sammyboy2059 @karimhaddad @kemper @khaledayyach

We’ll be back tomorrow in Ethiopia!

The Bahamas is the 96th stop on the iNaturalist World Tour. We hope all those affected by Hurricane Dorian are safe and recovering. The top observer is @marthar with observations clustered around the capital of Nassau. A cluster of top observers such as @graysquirrel, @mikeakresh, and @nataliewaddellrutter have observations clustered around San Salvador Island. @nataliewaddellrutter leads marine biology trips to the Gerace Research Station on San Salvador. @bennypoo and @noaboa's icons are pulled towards Florida from their mainland observations, but their Bahama observations are on islands like Great Abaco and elsewhere. @ardysnbread's observations are clustered on Great Abaco and @johnnybirder's on nearby Grand Bahama. @flabellare223 and @maractwin's observations are on clustered on North Bimini island.

The number of observations per month has been slowly inreasing over the last 4 years.

@maractwin is the top identifier and leads in fish IDs. The second top identifier, @kemper, also focuses on fish. @joshuagsmith leads in birds and @mikeakresh in plants. @nataliewaddellrutter leads in 'other animals' (in this case marine invertebrates) and @wayne\_fidler leads in insect IDs. Thanks to other top identifiers such as @chrisharpe.

What can we do to get more people in the Bahamas using iNaturalist? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread.

@marthar @graysquirrel @bennypoo @mikeakresh @noaboa @maractwin @kemper @joshuagsmith @mikeakresh @chrisharpe

We’ll be back tomorrow in Egypt!

Malawi is the 95th stop on the iNaturalist World Tour. The top observer is @marcoschmidtffm who researches african plants and has observations from up and down Malawi. The second top observer is @nanofishology with lots of observations around Liwonde National Park in the southern part of the country. Many of the top observers have observations based here, many in parks like Liwonde National Park, Majete Wildlife Reserve, Mulanje Mountain Forest Reserve, and Lengwe National Park including @markusgmeiner, @rguinness, @lemoncul and also @sethmusker, @tapaculo99 and @chinga. @martingrimm formerly based in Tanzania, has many observations along the border with Tanzania on the shores of Lake Malawi. @joachim and @michaelheuchert also have observations clustered in the northern half of the country.

The graph of observations per month is dominated by two peaks in December of 2017 driven by @nanofishology and in May of 2019 driven by @marcoschmidtffm and @rguinness

The top identifiers are our usual African continent identification superstars. The top identifier is @jakob who also leads in mammal IDs, @johnnybirder leads in birds, and @cabintom in insects. @calebcam leads in herp IDs and @sdressler in plant IDs. @alanhorstmann and @simontonge are also top identifiers in Malawi.

What can we do to get more people in Malawi using iNaturalist? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread.

@marcoschmidtffm @nanofishology @markusgmeiner @rguinness @martingrimm @jakob @johnnybirder @alanhorstmann @cabintom @simontonge

We’ll be back tomorrow in the Bahamas!

Morocco is the 94th stop on the iNaturalist World Tour. The top observer, @pedrozazafernandes, has observations clustered around the capital of Rabat along with @christianlangner, @elliotgreiner, and others. To the north, @finrod, who has worked extensively in Morocco, has observations clustered around Tangier on the border with Spain. You can read more about finrd in this Observation of the Week post. Also to the north, @joaotiagotavares has observations clustered near Meilla on the border with Algeria. @ynzklkli's observations are clustered around the coastal city of Casablanca while many top observers such as @vmoser, @yayabenzvi, and @nasserhalaweh have observations clustered in the mountains around Marrakesh. @demetztobias's observations are all over but weighted towards the south. Don't miss this Observation of the Week about a Sahara Sand Viper observation by @abdellahbouazza, a PhD based at Marrakech University, in the far south along the border with the disputed territory of Western Sahara.

The number of observations per month has been increasing since near 2017 peaking in March of this year around 650 observations.

The top three identifiers are @karimhaddad, @khaledayyach, and @salahtelailia from nearby Algeria. @karimhaddad also leads in bird IDs, @finrod leads in plant IDs, and @borisb leads in insects. @jakob is the fifth top identifier and leads in mammals.

What can we do to get more people in Morocco using iNaturalist? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread.

@pedrozazafernandes @christianlangner @finrod @elliotgreiner @ynzklkli @vmoser @karimhaddad @khaledayyach @salahtelailia @jakob @finrod

We’ll be back tomorrow in Malawi!

Nepal is the 93rd stop on the iNaturalist World Tour. The top observer is @hari-b who works at the IUCN Nepal office focussing on mammals species. @sebastiandoak, the second top observer, also has observations scattered across the country. @bikinitrip has observations clustered near the 2nd most populous city of Pokhara. @suresh\_ghimire and @manila\_folder have observations clustered in the Everest Region of northeastern Nepal. Several top observers such as @arthurdemaeght and @wildchroma have observations clustered near the capital of Kathmandu and to Langtang National Park to the north. Other top observers include @trcarlisle, @qin\_huang, and @subirshakya,

The number of observations per month has been steadily increasing since mid 2017. There are also 2 distinct peaks in November of 2017 and 2018 resulting from Western Washington University student expeditions to Langtang National Park organized by @abe. The 2019 expedition appears to be leaving in a few days - we'll look forward to the seeing what this expedition finds!

TThe top identifier is @sethmiller who also leads in birds. @abe leads in plant IDs and @anilamanalil leads in insect IDs. Other top identifiers include @subirshakya, @juhakinnunen, @rajibmaulick, and @elizabeth\_byers. @elizabeth\_byers is a vegetation ecologist focusing on subalpine and alpine ecosystems in eastern Nepal.

What can we do to get more people in Nepal using iNaturalist? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread.

@hari-b @sebastiandoak @bikinitrip @suresh_ghimire @manila_folder @sethmiller @subirshakya @juhakinnunen @rajibmaulick @elizabeth_byers

We’ll be back tomorrow in Morocco!

Given the success of national platforms like Artportalen.se, Naturgucker.de, and Waarneming.nl (all of which generate more observations than iNaturalist), it’s fair to ask what the benefits are of platforms like iNaturalist that aim to be more globally representative. iNaturalist has a North American bias, but it’s unique in that around 40% of its observations come from outside of its principal country (in this case the US).

Are there any benefits to platforms with global communities like iNaturalist that would allow them to compete with local platforms and compensate for the costs associated with less cohesive community cultures and identities? A huge part of the educational and scientific value of platforms like iNaturalist come from the quality and volume of identifications on observations. Identifications from the community allow novices to participate while simultaneously vetting data quality. If the geographic distribution of identifications is different from the geographic distribution of observations, then global platforms may better facilitate collaboration between observers and identifiers towards getting observations identified.

The animation below shows a sample of identifications on iNaturalist from a 24-hour period. The lines originate at the location of the identifier (approximated as the centroid of their observations) to the location of the observation they identified. Note that while many identifications originate from the same region as the observations (e.g. the United States, New Zealand, or South Africa), many identifications also originate from users in very different parts of the globe than the observations. If all identification expertise was geographically focused we'd expect to see only short lines, but because identification expertise has a different distribution we see longer lines.

There’s plenty of anecdotal reasons to think that identifications might be less geographically localized than observations. Aside from a handful of world travelers, most observers seem to be fairly geographically focused. In contrast, many identifiers appear to be geographically indiscriminate. Many of these identifiers are taxonomic specialists with broad geographic expertise. For example, the figure below shows the locations of a recent sample of 100 observations identified by each of @wongun in South Korea, @susanhewitt in New York, @jwidness in Connecticut, and @borisb in Germany within their respective specialty taxa.

One interesting study system to explore the impact of a global community of identifiers further is to compare the City Nature Challenge (CNC) 2019 bioblitzes from Ecuador. Of the two cities from Ecuador that competed in CNC 2019, Tena used the global iNaturalist platform for their bioblitz while Quito used a separate fork of the iNaturalist software localized for Spain called Natusfera. The Natusfera community is completely separate from the iNaturalist community and is almost entirely Spanish. Nonetheless, both Bioblitzes produced about the same number of observations (~37k) from the same number of observers (~1.2k). It’s also convenient that Natusfera and iNaturalist are otherwise nearly identical (since they are running roughly the same software).

We took a sample of 10,000 observations with photos from each Bioblitz and calculated the percentage of these observations that had an identification made by someone other than the observer. In the Natusfera Quito Bioblitz there were many fewer identifications per observation (0.1) compared with the iNaturalist Tena Bioblitz (2.0). And in Quito, only 8% of the identifications came from outside of Ecuador (the orange lines connect the origin of the identifications to the observations) while in Tena 37% came from outside of Ecuador.

In this analysis, there were many more identifications contributed to observations on the global iNaturalist platform compared with the local Natusfera platform. There are certainly several factors that account for this discrepancy. One is likely the hard work and local expertise contributed by local identifiers which included members of the INABIO staff such as @inclandj who sponsored the Tena event. Likewise the size of the Ecuadorian community on iNaturalist (~200k observations) is larger than the Ecuadorian Natusfera community (~40,000 observations).

But if identifications had identical geographic distributions as observations, we’d expect similar, small proportions identifications coming from outside of Ecuador on both Natusfera and iNaturalist. The fact that percentage of identifications coming from outside of Ecuador is nearly 4 times larger on iNaturalist supports the hypothesis laid out above that identifications have a less geographically focused distribution than observations.

If this pattern is general, then the ability for global communities like iNaturalist to lend identification expertise from around the globe to observations from any particular locale gives them a clear benefit over local communities that can only draw on local identification expertise. But whether these benefits can compensate for the costs associated with moderating global communities and their many disparate cultures, languages, and identities remains to be seen. The iNaturalist Network is an attempt to maintain these benefits of a global community while mitigating the issues associated with moderating a global platform by collaborating with local institutions to localize iNaturalist at the national level.

Its Week 14 of the iNaturalist World Tour. This week we'll visit Guam in the Pacific, Nepal in Asia, Morocco, Malawi, Egypt, and Ethiopia in Africa, and the Bahamas in the Caribbean.

We begin in Guam. The top observer is @aaashton with observations mostly of sea creatures clustered around Apra Harbor on the west side of the island. The second top observer is @aubreymoore, an entomologist working at the University of Guam, with observations clustered at the Uniersity along with several other top observers such as @carol\_kwok, @leaf and @jakemanuel. @jakemanuel is studying agriculture and life sciences at the University of Guam. @micahfreedman's observations are clustered to the northern end of the island where he worked on the Ecology of Bird Loss Project. @ttadevosyan, working US Geological Survey Brown Treesnake Project, also has observations clustered north of the University. @ninamp, a graduate student at University of Guam, @juliaschwierking, and @glokplopit have observations clustered towards the southern end of the island.

There was a peak in observations during April, 2018 when several project including the aphid project administered by @weixiao2, the ag bi 345 f15 project administered by @aubreymoore and the fa 15 uog crb damage survey project administered by @umijin - all associated with the university, were in full effect.

The top identifier is @jasonrgrant who also leads in plant IDs. @borisb leads in insect IDs and @maractwin in fish IDs. Thanks to other top identifiers such as @lisa\_bennett, @manila\_folder, and @kemper

What can we do to improve iNaturalist in Guam? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread.

@aaashton @aubreymoore @carol_kwok @leaf @micahfreedman @jasonrgrant @lisa_bennett @manila_folder @maractwin @kemper

We’ll be back tomorrow in Nepal!

Our Observation of the Week is quite a scene! A Thomisus crab spider eating an African Honey Bee while jackal flies take advantage of the situation. Seen in South Africa by @richardgill.

“I am a self-taught amateur plant-lover that began with a love of trees when I was 19,” says Richard Gill, “I purchased the Palgraves book of southern African trees and started trying to key out any tree I could find - with one hand on the Glossary page to start learning what all the botanical terms meant.” 

His interest in trees sparked Richard’s curiosity about other taxa, and he explains “this journey has had me delving into particular favourite areas such as orchids, bulbs, grasslands, wildflowers and more. The more I learn the more I am fascinated by how interconnected things are, and how little we know about the precious ecosystems we are destroying.”

I’ve personally exulted in my own luck when finding a pollinator perched perfectly on a flower, only to quickly (or sometimes not so quickly) realize the insect was being held in the chelicerae of a crab spider (family Thomisidae), and Richard tells me the spider above was found in just the same way.

The crab spider observation occurred when a nurseryman friend was showing me a beautiful natural hybrid he was impressed by. The dark colour of the bee and jackal flies caught my eye, and only on closer inspection did I see the crab spider. I watched in fascination as the flies seemed to be heckling the spider despite their small size, and wondered if they were trying to prey on the bee. Now I know they are called kleptoparasites - my new favourite word of the week - thanks iNat :)

While the spider’s coloration matched the flower’s quite well to the Richard’s eye, scientists have discovered there’s a lot more going on when you look at the UV spectrum - which is the way many pollinators see things. Flowers, such as Potentilla anserina, have markings visible under UV light (check out these photos), and it is believed they attract and guide pollinators to the nectar and pollen. Under UV light, crab spiders often mimic these UV guide markings, making them quite attractive to bees and other insects, while their visible light coloration protects them from predators. 

And as Richard noted, the jackal flies swarming the crab and its prey are kleptoparasites, meaning they steal or feed off of another animal’s prey item - in this case, the bee. It is believed jackal flies (also called freeloader flies) are especially attracted to the smells given off by dying hemiptera and hymenoptera, and it is usually the females who are kleptoparasitic. And some in the genus Desmometopa, 

[appear to act] as cleaners of the spiders, with the spiders spreading their wet and sticky chelicerae thus allowing the flies to feed actively all over the bases, fangs and mouth. McMillan also observed the flies to feed at the anal opening when the spiders defaecated. This behaviour appears to be more a case of commensalism, which is beneficial to both parties, than of kleptoparasitism.

Richard (above) had been using groups on Facebook as a place to upload his photos, but found that 

the information isn't all searchable and gets lost over time. So iNat has been awesome; it is great to be building a decent searchable database of my various observations, with quality IDs, and a network of like-minded people, while knowing my observation may be useful in future. I am loving it!

- by Tony Iwane

- The adult Epicadus heterogaster crab spider sits on leaves and uses UV reflection and its flower-like body to attract prey - no real flowers needed!

- Watch this video of jackal flies dining on a crab spider's prey.

We end Week 13 of the iNaturalist World Tour in Eswatini (formerly known as Swaziland). The top observer is @katebraunsd who is developing the Biodiversity Explorer for the Swaziland National Trust Commission. The second top observer is @shauns from neighboring South Africa. @lindaloffler, the author of the Swaziland Tree Atlas, is the third top observer. Other top observers include @hermanberteler, @birdernaturalist, @ctnash, @jacobddowen, @jeanstephenson, @jlparks92 and @rob\_palmer.

There seems to be a bit of reverse 'northern-hemisphere-seasonality' happening in Eswatini with observations pealing in around January. January 2015 and 2019 were the years with the most observations.

@tonyrebelo is the top identifier. All of the top five identifiers are from neighboring South Africa: @tonyrebelo, @colin25, @alanhorstmann, @jan-hendrik, & @beetledude. @jan-hendrik leads in plants, @beetledude in insects, and @colin25 in birds.

What can we do to get more people in Eswatini using iNaturalist? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread.

@katebraunsd @shauns @lindaloffler @hermanberteler @birdernaturalist @tonyrebelo @colin25 @alanhorstmann @jan-hendrik @beetledude

We’ll be back tomorrow in Guam!

Martinique is the 90th stop on the iNaturalist World Tour. The top observer is @erikamitchell with observations clustered at the island's southern tip. @m-bourgade-mk, of the Institut Caribéen de l’Ecologie et du Vivant (ICEV), also has observations clustered here. Many other top observers such as @annikaml, @patsimpson2000, @sandrinesy, @raboul, @kamisama, and @supersecretspyguy have observations centered on the southern half of the island. While a few, such as @kyhlaustin and @bosphorus, are clustered in the northern half.

The number of observations per month continues to be very jagged, indicating that it is mostly driven by the random visits of a few people.

The top identifier is @chrisharpe, an ornithologist and co-author of 'Lynx & BirdLife International Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies'. @john8, @m-bourgade-mk, and @jasondombroskie lead in bird, plant, and insect IDs. Thanks to other top identifiers such as @joshuagsmith and @rjq.

What can we do to get more people in Martinique using iNaturalist? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread.

@erikamitchell @m-bourgade-mk @kyhlaustin @annikaml @patsimpson2000 @raboul @chrisharpe @john8 @joshuagsmith @m-bourgade-mk @rjq

We’ll be back tomorrow in Eswatini!