Estonia - iNaturalist World Tour
The Baltic country of Estonia is the 116th stop on the iNaturalist World Tour. Estonia sits in northeastern Europe on the Baltic Sea with Finland to the north, Russia to the east, and Lativia to the south. The top observer is @jurga_li southwestern Estonia near the fourth largest city of Pärnu. @peeter, who is helping translate iNaturalist into Estonian, has observations clustered around the second largest city of Tartu. Several other top observers such as @wouterkoch @kaarelv and @qgroom also have observations clustered here. @kaarelv is a bird and nature guide in Estonia. @tiggrx and @inasiebert have observations clustered in the western tip of Estonia near the two largest islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa, @almantas observations are widely dispersed across Estonia. Several top observers such as @belyykit and @chalkberg, an Estonian biology student, have observations clustered around the capital of Tallinn.
the number of observations per month seems to have ticked up in 2019, but the huge peak in August was mostly driven by a visit by top observer @jurga_li.
The top identifier, @kastani, leads in bird and mammal IDs. @almantas leads in plant and fungi IDs while the mysterious @villu leads in insect IDs. Other top identifiers include @ldacosta, @juhakinnunen, and @tiggrx.
What can we do to get more people in Estonia using iNaturalist? Please share your thoughts below or on this forum thread.
@jurga_li @peeter @tiggrx @almantas @belyykit @chalkberg @inasiebert @kastani @ldacosta @juhakinnunen
We’ll be back tomorrow in the Cayman Islands!
Comments
@veljorunnel, any thoughts? Things that can be learned from the PlutoF platform perhaps?
I think many use national platforms to share observations. (These end up in national portal http://elurikkus.ee). Many probable are not aware that iNaturalist supports Estonian language. I just discovered it now :)
Yeah, the language options are hidden very well!
interesting - can people post observations directly to http://elurikkus.ee or do they post somewhere else (from which http://elurikkus.ee harvests)? If the latter what is the most widely used platform people post directly to in Estonia?
When I visited Estonia this summer, nobody, whom I talked to, knew about inaturalist. Mainly, the answer was “… you see, we have our national platforms…”. I really do not know the reason for low activity on inaturalist from Estonia and Latvia. Neither presence of well-working national platforms, nor the language barrier could be the explanation. In Nordic countries they have well working national platforms but still there are high numbers of inatters from these countries. In Lithuania, until recently, there was no Lithuanian version, but the activities have been high even then. Though this might be explained by a very enthusiastic advocating of the platform by @almantas
There are two main local platforms for biodiversity data. One is PlutoF (https://plutof.ut.ee), this is more science oriented and has numerous additional features. Another platform is LVA (https://lva.keskkonnainfo.ee/default.aspx?state=1;877954539;est;lvadb;;&lang=eng), this only for field observations and not so science oriented. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages and they are competing with each other.
eElurikkus (https://elurikkus.ee/) is a web portal, that uses data from both mentioned platforms in order to summarize the data. You can't put data directly to eElurikkus website. Of course in both named platforms you can also search data and get overviews of taxa etc. but it will be only for data in that particular platform.
I think best advantage of iNaturalist is the social media component. Neither Estonian platforms have that well advanced possibilities for identifying and commenting observations with worldwide community.
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