Singapore - iNaturalist World Tour
Singapore is the 26th stop on the iNaturalist World Tour. For being a tiny country, Singapore is disproportionately well represented on iNaturalist. Its home to 3 observers (@budak, @gancw1, @kokhuitan) who are in the top 500 observers across all of iNaturalist and some other local power observers such as @big-simonchan, @sohkamyung and @techieoldfox. Be sure to give this observation of the week on sohkamyung and this one on budak a read.
The observations per month graph is a bit unusual compared to graphs we've looked at so far. The graph spiked up in March of 2014 thanks to @techieoldfox and then ratcheted to a new level in early 2017 (anyone know why?). Since then growth seems to have leveled off around a steady 2,000 observations per month. There have been some great projects in Singapore including Butterflies of Singapore started by @gancw1, Singapore Moths started by @hkmoths. @meiyeesung has done some great outreach through the Nature Society Singapore with schools through this umbrella project.
In Singapore 4 of the top observers (@gancw1, @kokhuitan, @techieoldfox, @sohkamyung) are also the top identifiers. @rajibmaulick has added many identifications from India. @johnascher is a top identifiers not just in Singapore but around the world particularly for bees. He also happens to be a professor at the National University of Singapore.
How can we make iNaturalist better in Singapore? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread
@budak @big-simonchan @gancw1 @sohkamyung @kokhuitan @techieoldfox @rajibmaulick @johnascher @marcelfinlay @christinechua
We’ll be back tomorrow with the Netherlands!
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The Butterfly and Insect Group (BIG) of Nature Society of Singapore (NSS) started promoting the use of iNaturalist after organising a moth workshop facilitated at Roger Kendrick in 2014. The Singapore Moths and Butterflies of Singapore projects were setup after the workshop. I gave 2 talks on iNaturalist in 2017, one at the national library for the public and one at NSS for NSS members. While there have been an increase in contribution in butterfly and moths in the last 2 years, the contribution however, were mainly from a few power users. A large majority of naturalist and nature photographers in Singapore continue to post exclusively on social media and not on iNaturalist. There is also a lack of identifiers in the region and most of the identifications were from the same handful of top identifiers in the region.
The top identifiers for observations from Singapore are @techieoldfox for plants, @kokhuitan for birds, @tlsv2, @hkmoths and @juhakinnunen for Lepidoptera, @johnascher for birds and insects and @briangooding for Odonata.
I am very pleased to have managed to convinced @tlsv2 to join iNaturalist in Jun 2018. @tlsv2 is well-respected butterfly expert in many Malaysia and Singapore butterfly forums and his identifications are always accompanied by insightful identification keys and cross-references. The increased in the number of moth species in the Singapore Moths project in the last 2 years were largely the result of @tlsv2 tireless identification effort. Thanks you @tlsv2.
Thanks for the mention in the post. :-) I think it was after listening to one of the talks by @gancw1 at the Singapore National Library that I increased my usage of iNat by identifying observations. It's been a lot of fun so far and I'm still learning from other observers.
The comments by @tlsv2 on identification are good and helpful to justify the ID of some lepidoptera in Malaysia and Singapore that I'm not familiar with.
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