50% of all Vertebrates Observed!
We were looking back at this post from almost exactly three years ago when we announced that we'd tallied one third of all vertebrate species. We re-crunched the numbers and it looks like we're now at 50%! Here's the same breakdown by species group (apologies for switching the colors compared to the older figure, but we though it was a bit more intuitive this way)
We've broken 90% with birds with 9,761 of 10,560 species having been logged. And we are now above 50% for reptiles (6,824 of 11,350 species), mammals (3,322 of 5,818 species) and amphibians (4,317 of 8,229 species). The average is being brought down by the most diverse group fishes which includes the ray-finned fishes (10,158 of 33,128 species) and the other fish orders such as sharks and rays (602 of 1,427 species).
We're still logging a dozen or so new vertebrates a day, but we expect this rate to taper off as only rarer and rarer species remain. Any bets on how long it will take us to get to two thirds of all vertebrates?
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Australasian Fishes putting in a big effort to help fill in those missing fishes, up over 2600 species now!
Congratulations all on this milestone.
I hope that we are not being plant blind? Currently:
Vascular Plants: 112k of 308k = 36%
Monocots: 23k of 74k = 31%
Eudicots:83k of 210k =39%
Surely though, quite a few countries should have over 50% of their plants done?
eg South Africa 18k of 22k: 82%
Australia 14k of 24k: 60%
And dont forget Fungi: we can celebrate when we have 1% of species! (currently 0.6%)
92% of birds is great, but not unusual. Most inaturalist users are birdwatchers, so this is very much expected. But great milestone!
If it took 3 years to go from 2/6 to 3/6 verts, I would guess that we’ll be waiting quite a while for 4/6. Even five years seems like too small a timeframe, especially with covid still restricting travel. Guess we need more deep sea iNatters
That's a phenomenal milestone! Congratulations to this amazing community.
Wow! Let's keep going and get 100%!
My guess: 1 year to get to 2/3 :)
This is a cool milestone, but dont we really need a bit of guidance?
For instance,
Which countries are at different milestones?
Which species are missing for each country?
Which countries should we visit when Covid allows us to travel and we can start planning?
My guess: 14 Feb 2025 from collecting, but if people add their old photos, then 16 Dec 2024:
I'm with @tonyrebelo - I'd love some guidance! A search for research-grade vascular plant species in Massachusetts, USA, where I live, turns up 1,933 taxa. The state-issued vascular plant checklist has around 3,000 taxa listed, so there are possibly over 1,00 taxa missing from iNat. Which ones are they? Do I need to finally learn sedges? Learn to take photos through a dissecting scope? And fungi - well, I barely know where to begin. Even common lichens are confusing me. Are there search URLs that will tell us which species are still missing from a particular area?
On the other hand, when it's finally safe to travel to Australia, where one of my sisters lives, I will happily do my best to visit the middles of nowhere and add whatever I can.
The invertebrate coverage in cases is quite good, too.
Depends on attractiveness for photographers, and possibility of identification on species level with pictures only, sure. And needs identifiers who do the stuff (guess that's a problem with plants in many botanic regions).
Example:
After I did the neotropical Flea beetle genus Omophoita about two years ago, I was curious what the count would be - and found it close to 40% of known species. I chose the butterfly genus Diaethria (likewise neotropical) and found it as 85% present
[14 species known only], then.
Today, the 88s are fully covered, guess that because of successful growth of iNaturalist in Latin America!
This is so cool!
Very impressive. We are all doing well, and will continue to do better still!
With shelled mollusks, I can say that people need to be more aware of the small and very small species, which greatly outnumber the easily visible species, species which you can notice when you are standing up and walking along.
@susanhewitt good to know! I'll get a fine-mesh sieve and hit some creeks!
Great! Be aware that ID-ing some of the tiny shelled mollusks (marine, freshwater, or terrestrial) can sometimes be quite a challenge, but once we have the records and photos up on iNat, we can at least make a start.
In freshwater habitats, I would recommend dragging your sieve through fine textured water plants, and also sieving the upper layer of the bottom sediments.
People with access to beaches can look for areas that appear to have fine-grained detritus, and get down on their hands and knees, or even knees and elbows to look for small and tiny shells.
Flood debris that is is sometimes present on the edges of rivers and lakes can also be searched very closely for small shells of land snails, as well as freshwater species.
I use neoprene knee and elbow pads, and wearing those, I can crawl along on a beach for hours every day without scraping the skin off my elbows and knees.
Awesome. I know that personally, I'd love some iNat guidance for my Township, County, State, ecoregion, etc. as to what species are (potentially) missing so that I could direct my efforts and perhaps target those unencountered taxa. As an ecologist and modeler of species' distributions, I entirely appreciate the enormous complexity of this task. So perhaps very broad paint strokes is the place to start (e.g., comparing a list of observed species within a state/providence from iNat to a list of historically observed species for that region generated from GBIF). This post (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/a-way-to-search-needed-missing-species/15979) and response from @tiwane
make me hopeful that such a product is on the horizon. We all need help and encouragement to expand our iNat efforts, and to shine the light on those underrepresented taxa.
Congratulations!
That's terrific! To be honest I was expecting the counts to be even higher, in my head, but it makes sense once I think about it. I imagine there's only so many people who get to document deep sea or open fish, and things like endemic species in the heart of very specific jungles or mountains.
@tonyrebelo I wouldn't be surprised if the plant numbers were actually higher, but just lacked enough botanists on here to identify them. I know I get at least a good guess on most animal obvs pretty quickly but still have plenty of plants lingering. It's hard because unlike so many animals, their forms can be so varied! I know I can only do the most obvious ones.
First of all Congratulations. It's a great achievement. There still more work left.
I would love to get some guidance regarding the species of Maldives too...Need more observers here in the Maldives...
Is there a link to look up unobserved species?
@birdwhisperer - yes, for 'complete taxa' which includes all vertebrates, on any taxon page above species (e.g. Piciformes) you'll see the TOTAL SPECIES OBSERVED tally
and in the Trends tab there's a Wanted section that shows the missing species
I was been thinking about this some more while I was out walking just now. I realized I often forget to say Thank You! to both the iNaturalist staff and to all the iNaturalist contributors; instead, I'm greedy and saying, Give Me More!
Well, OK, I do want more, but iNaturalist has enriched my life enormously (and I was a professional biologist to begin with) and it astounds me all the time how much iNaturalist is contributing to the knowledge of the natural world. So, thank you! And good work!
@loarie. There appears to be a bug:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/43083-Hyracoidea says 5 out of 5, but if I filter the page to southern Africa is says 0 out of 5. If I view the observations or species on the species tab, we have 3 out of 3 in southern Africa, and 5 out of 5 for Africa.
If I refresh the page then it does give 5 out of 5 for southern Africa (or Africa), even though there are only 3 species, but if I change the area, it reverts to 0 out of 5.
I guess the total has not been programmed for the "filter by place" option. (can be philosophically fixed by showing the place total "of xx worldwide" - as total species per "place" is unlikely to be available)
Note that the trending, discoveries and wanted (trends tab) are not influenced by any place filters - they are always global.
I can't wait until we get to 50% of all invertebrates (we're currently at 12%).
Congrats!
Hope this is not due to extinctions...
Sorry, really amazing, congrats to all!
So cool! My most unusual vertebrate sighting is Wied's Marmoset, endemic only to Bahia, Brazil. Only 16 observations!
This is Awesome! When you think about it 50% Is quite a humongous achievement, considering that we keep discovering brand new Vertebrates every day!
@tonyrebelo - 'Total Species Observed' stats are global and should be completely independent from the 'Filter by Place' setting. ie in the link you shared it should always be '5 of 5' regardless of the setting. Playing with this it does seem that sometimes when futzing with the Filter by Place setting the numerator occassionally gets set to 0 which is a bug, but it doesn't seem to be consistently reproducible to me and on a page reload always goes back to '5 of 5'. So definitely a bit glitchy but hard to assess as a bug unless you can find a way to reproduce.
@tonyrebelo I'm sure big part of it can be uploaded from archives of new users, especially by scientists who described tropical species in recent decades.
Well Melodi - invite them on board!!
Just some thoughts on the opposite side of the scale? Just had a project display "funny" and it is because although we have 335 observations, not one of them is identified to species (and so the middle summary panel is missing).
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?locale=en&place_id=113055&preferred_place_id=113055&subview=grid&taxon_id=47951&verifiable=any&view=species
So what groups are performing really badly? (hint? small, ugly, nocturnal, soil, fungi). Are there any though, where we might be able to make a big difference with a little effort? (including perhaps winning over a world expert to iNat)
I did already leave some notes here about how to greatly increase the number of shelled mollusks we are recording, by concentrating more on searching for the smaller species.
@tonyrebelo most insect groups will perish if we will get tons of local experts, small rove beetles will still have problems as they're very hard to id without catching them, but bigger insects, like wasps and macro parasitoids can be ided, but there's nobody to do so or nobody with knowledge of local fauna, especially with rich regions where iNatting is not that popular, or popular among children, experts are coming after everybody else already joined.
I think there was a topic with list of badly going taxa, but you're right, small, super small and undistinguishable without instruments is what you normally can't get a proper info/id from if you have only smartphone or a camera.
I don't know many experts in person and those who I know have so much work to do, so many insects to pin and describe, so seeing them doing it 24/7 I realise they just don't have enought time to spend on iNat so I don't agitate them, but I know that some people finally came to iNat and helped us with ids.
@vihaking277 I don't think the site demograhphics are especially skewed in favour of birders. If anything due to the popularity of eBird, they may be under-represented on the site.
Roughly 350,000 uses have submitted a bird record to the site and the average observer has submitted 23 records. By way of comparison, 660,000 people have submitted an insect record averaging 22 each, and 960,000 observers have submitted a plant record, averaging 24 each.
I think the completeness of birds comes down to 3 things : being a relatively small group with only about 10,000 species, many of those species having a broad geographic distribution, and being a group which is amongst the easiest to identify.
And birding is the one segment of Natural History that has been actively growing in popularity in recent years.
In contrast, many of the numerous regional shell clubs that used to exist have been shutting down for lack of interest among younger people, and the aging out of the older followers.
So it's just that identification is difficult in some species! But I do not think eBird has anything bad to do with the stuff here. eBird can be used as a joint force with iNaturalist, because that's what I do.
as a fan of completing things, I find this post amazing!
I will work hard to find the local specie no one "seen" before at iNat.
Currently I have 134 "firsts" on iNat and 5 of them are Vertebrata
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