India - iNaturalist World Tour
We end the 3rd week of the iNaturalist World Tour in India. The top observers in India are distributed across the country from @ivijayanand, a rural physician based in Assam, northeast India (near @rejoicegassah, @rohitmg, and others) to @chiefredearth who's posted observations from across the subcontinent. Top observers @aniruddha_singhamahapatra, @rajibmaulick, @subhajit_roy have observations centered around West Bengal. @firos_ak is the top observer from the southern part of the subcontinent near Bangalore. @vinodborselac and others (e.g. @vijaybarve and @ravinaidu) show up in the center of the subcontient while there is a cluster of top users such as @jagdishsupekar near Mumbai.
There's been noticeable activity on iNaturalist from India since at least 2012. This coincides with @vijaybarve creating iNaturalist projects such as this one linked to the DiversityIndia site. But activity has ramped up appreciably since 2017. There have been numerous interesting projects from India using iNaturalist such as the Marine Life of Mumbai project by @shaunak, @pradip, and others and featured in this blog post.
@rajibmaulick is the top identifier in India followed by @sethmiller (who only joined iNaturalist recently but has contributed a larger number of identifications to Indian bird observations) and the mysterious @niccolasmiller. @juhakinnunen and @charliev have contributed their knowledge of India's biodiversity from of Finland and Austalia respectively. @vijaybarve is doing post-doctoral research in Florida at the moment, but has close ties to India.
What can we do to get more people from India participating in iNaturalist? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum post.
@ivijayanand @chiefredearth @rejoicegassah @aniruddha_singhamahapatra @subhajit_roy @rajibmaulick @sethmiller @niccolasmiller @juhakinnunen @vijaybarve
We’ll kick off Week 4 tomorrow with South Korea!
Comments
It's been really nice to see the few observations of Euphorbia sect. Anisophyllum that have been uploaded from here. The species there are beautiful!
these? https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6681&subview=grid&taxon_id=506796&view=species
Wow
Yep. The E. laciniata was a new one to me and E. cf. concanensis was posted earlier this week (still have to confirm that as it's at genus level right now). It may not be much yet, especially compared to the overall number of species present, but if a sign of things to come, I'm really excited.
India has two major efforts in similar direction the India Biodiversity Portal [https://indiabiodiversity.org/] and Biodiversity Atlas of India [https://www.bioatlasindia.org/]. This could be the reason, growth in India has been slow. It will be interesting to see how it grows now that is has caught some steam. Since July 2017 we are posting at least 1000 records per month and since June 2018 at least 3000. I won't be surprised if we post next 100K records in 12 to 15 months.
@ivijayanand @chiefredearth @rejoicegassah @aniruddha_singhamahapatra @subhajit_roy @rajibmaulick @firos_ak @swanand @vinodborselac @ravinaidu @jagdishsupekar can we do it?
@vijaybarve : 1L observations in 15 months means around 6666 observations a month. This, to me, is very much achievable if we, as a team, dedicatedly keep on uploading our observations.
I think so @subhajit_roy Four out of six months this year, we do have more than 5000 records posted. And we have some really active identifiers too, which helps a lot.
https://sites.google.com/site/efloraofindia/ has over 3000 members documenting the botanical diversity of India.
@rejoicegassah and me have uploaded over 10,000 observations from the "Makunda Nature Club". I am a full-time paediatric surgeon in a busy hospital and am also handicapped by poor heart function following a heart attack but have still contributed over 7400 observations. I see my biodiversity work as contributing to a better understanding of the wildlife (flora and fauna) of the region where I work and spend a considerable portion of my free-time in taking photographs, identifying observed species and uploading to iNat. The majority of iNat observations come from a small number of observers and the way to increase this is to create more high-volume observers.
I am so impressed with the great photographers and naturalists in India! I thought many of you may be interested in this article that highlights a need for more plant data from India and other target countries. https://india.mongabay.com/2019/07/citizen-scientists-to-scout-for-wildflowers-across-four-countries/
I can clear the mystery on @niccolasmiller :) He is my younger brother and just in the last few days finally got around to adding some details to his profile. We're both young birders growing up in BD, but have traveled a fair amount. The only reason he doesn't have any observations on iNat yet is he has just ordered his camera and won't get it until late August.
I do think iNat is a great tool! and hopefully more and more people will start getting into it especially in this area of the world.
We just updated the figures above to include data from July and looks like there was nearly a doubling of observations in July!- any idea what contributed to this?
@loarie : Probably in pursuit of the National Moth Week, and the fact that since it is monsoon time, rainy season contributes to much more invertebrate observations.
I agree with @subhajit_roy National Moth Week is certainly a factor. Also a push to post more using this blog post must have contributed to the growth. India has moved to number 20 already. Let us hope we keep this pace and do next 100K much sooner.
There is a similar website/database operating in India with thousands of users and over 500,000 observations. It is at http://www.indianaturewatch.net/. Perhaps iNat would be interested in working out a collaboration with those folks.
@loarie Looks like we have even more records than July 2019 in August 2019. Are you planning to revise the figures again next month?
Wow - very cool and Yes! Will update on the 1st of September
You're right @vijaybarve, a big jump in number of observations per month in August - 17.7k!
September was good with 16.8K records. If we keep this pace for next 2-3 months, we will both cross 200K mark and surpass two more countries in number of records posted. We are also adding some cool endemic insect species (new records to iNaturalist) thanks to @amolpatwardhan and @naturemates for contributions.
Another important effort by @suhelq and his NCF team in the project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/ncf-india has been adding some really cool records pan India and has already crossed 10K mark. They have 19 members who have posted more than 100 records each.
Just updated the stats for October - India has moved into 18th space passing Spain! https://inaturalist.github.io/internationals_all.html
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