200,000,000 observations on iNaturalist!
This week iNaturalist passed another big observation milestone: 200,000,000 verifiable observations! It took iNaturalist 14 years to reach 100 million and just 2 more years to reach 200 million.
If each observation were a coin, the stack would be almost 200 miles high.
If each observation were a minute, we could spin the clock back to the year 1644.
If each observation were a horse, that would be 3 times as many horses as are on Earth today.
Let’s take a closer look at these observations as 200 dots where each represents 1 million observations.
Imagine 200 million observations are represented by 200 dots
133 of the 200 dots are of plants and insects. Fish are represented by just 2 dots.
How many dots from each species category?
114 of the 200 dots are from in North America. Africa and South America have the fewest dots.
How many dots are from each continent?
The graph below shows the number of observations posted each month since iNaturalist was launched in 2008. The number of observations has continued to grow each year breaking 6 million observations per month for the first time this year.
Observations Over Time
This map shows the number of observations by country. Just under half of all iNaturalist observations are from the United States.
Observations by Country
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the 200 million observations and helped identify them! More than 90 million of these records are shared with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which has led to more than 5000 publications.
If you want to look back at how we celebrated past observation milestones, you can read about 150 million, 100 million, 50 million, 25 million and 15 million.
Observations and identifications are the social currency of iNaturalist that keeps the community thriving. If you’d also like to financially support the non-profit operations behind-the-scenes, you can make a gift in dozens of currencies.
Thank you for everything that you do to support iNaturalist!
Comentarios
Amazing! I remember the celebrations for the first 100 million. I guess we can reach the 300 million already next year?
Woah
The growth leaves me speechless and I can only begin to imagine the challenges this poses to scaling iNat's technical infrastructure accordingly! Thanks to the entire team for making this possible!
I wonder what the 200,000,000th observation was? Does anyone know?
Do we know the observation that made 200.000.000? :) also, kudos to everyone involved in this milestone! totally amazing!!!
I don't think it's possible to really determine which observation is the 200 millionth verifiable observation, since lots of observations are being changed between verifiable and casual by Data Quality Assessment votes. So for example, an observation of a pet could have been uploaded as the 200 millioth verifiable obs, then changed to casual by being voted as not wild. And so many observations are constantly being uploaded and changed.
81 dots for green stuff.
Plants are all in one icon.
For almost HALF of all iNat's obs.
We need many different plant icons.
Feature request has been declined.
Yes: but what will those icons be? Mosses, Liverworts, Ferns, Gymnosperms. Magnolids, Fabids, Malvids, Campanulids, Lamiids, Monocots ?
Will they mean anything to anybody?
Anyone can ID to icon level in vertebrates. Only a handful of iNat identifiers can ID beyond "Plants".
And still 10 million are daisies! - Now there is another Milestone for iNaturalist!!
(only insects, birds and fungi are bigger than daisies! - 10 dots!)
Hey folks, let's please keep this on topic. There's a feature request on the forum about it.
I never expected iNat to gain a further 100 million observations so soon after the first 100 million!
That first set of comparisons offers an obvious lead-in to more of the same:
-- If each of the 200M observations was a single M&M candie, it would take me 42 days to consume them. If I'm working late into the night identifying those observations, it would only take me 4.2 hours.
-- If each of the observations were just the size of a small bacterium (1 micron), you could line them all up along the length of my home street, Salton Drive, but please don't.
-- If each of the observations were the length of the longest Blue Whale ever recorded (33.5 m) and lined up end to end, they would stretch 6.7 billion kilometers (4.2 billion miles). If you could find enough actual Blue Whales to do that, that would pretty much fill up the World's oceans with a massive conga line of blubber.
-- If you had a dollar for each of the observations, you'd be...well, you could donate it all back to iNaturalist.org so they can keep up the great work. You should probably stretch that out so they'd only get about $1 million per month and you could be a celebrated sustaining donor for about 200 months. Could happen...
Or 1 observations for each 4 persons on Earth ...
(fixed: thanks Robert)
@gcwarbler your suggestions made me laugh! You must really like M&Ms. ;-)
If anyone is interested in becoming a million-dollar-a-month supporter, or just making a $200M gift, please let us know! :-D
Or, 200 million cents is $20,000 if anyone is looking to made a penny-per-observation milestone gift. That's more than we can accept online so you'll have to send a check (or stock transfer) for that one. :-) @michelle12456 and I are happy to answer questions about planning major gifts (seriously).
Congratulations!
A conversion for those outside the US, Liberia, and Myanmar: 200 miles ≈ 322 km. Congratulations to iNaturalist on passing this kilometrestone.
Hooray! I love this place so much 💚
Congratulations! iNaturalist is awesome!!
That is amazing!
Great job to all the people working to make this possible!
@tonyrebelo - Or 25 observations for each person on Earth ...alive in 7000BC?
If one in every 40 people on earth today (or just ever resident of Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Dhaka, Sao Paulo, Cairo, Mexico City, and Pune, or every baby born in the last 520 days) post a single observation we can double this.
It is simply wonderful that iNaturalist has hit this milestone and I'm looking forward to the next big milestone - maybe verifiable observations of 500,000 species? And I hope iNaturalist has having a positive impact on the appreciation of biodiversity worldwide. Maybe we'll hit 400,000 identifiers world-wide as well - that would help with all the IDs that need to be made for over 200 million observations!
That was quick. I did not expect that this mile stone would be reached that quick. Good to see that insects and plants are more numerous than birds.
Awesome!
Wow, amazing. Congratulations and I am happy to have contributed my share of it.
done
Well done everyone!
Wow! It’s amazing what a community that shares the same passion can contribute this much in the past 2 years. Inat is a great place which I am so thankful for allowing me to contribute 50,000 observations to the 200 million.
Looking forward to 300 million in the next year!
Yay, congrats!
AMAZING!!!! CONGRATS ONE AND ALL!
I am happy to be part of the contributors to the success of these great achievement.Congratulations to iNaturalist and other contributors of this success.
Amazing! Congratulations to everyone who contributed to this milestone.
But the world map still shows very clearly that we need to become much better known in many nations.
The observations are mostly concentrated in countries with lower biodiversity, while many mega-diverse countries such as Brazil, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Iran, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Thailand or Venezuela still have enormous growth potential.
At the same time, the experts are also often more concentrated in countries with predominantly lower biodiversity. This leads to the paradoxical situation that as an iNaturalist Identifier you can make many great discoveries in biodiverse countries, even though there are still relatively few observations there overall.
I myself am therefore identifying fewer and fewer observations from my home country of Germany, instead I am concentrating on countries like the ones I mentioned above.
I can no longer imagine my life without iNaturalist, and I hope that many other people will have this life-enriching experience with nature, with iNaturalist as an important tool to support them.
If people everywhere feel that they are an important part of the community and that their observations are significant and are being used in the best possible way, then iNaturalist has a great future ahead of it worldwide!
Congratulations to the iNat team and to all of us for being part of it, what an incredible achievement!
The stat of 6 million a month is truly incredible. Looking forward to the research potential of a dataset like this!
I'd love to see the observations over time spilt by hemisphere (north vs. south).
Is N Am + Europe + Asia versus S Am + Africa + Oceana not what you want?
@kai_schablewski it's great that there're people knowledgeable in species from tropical countries, I guess the problem stems from the fact that we get iders from the same places as observers, as long as they contribute ids and help slowing down the growth of needs id pile, they're doing their best, maybe one insect id from Kongo will be more valuable for the science, but the fact that another person ided 300 German butterflies, so they don't stand in from of the Kongo one, matters too.
If every observation would be a song/piece, you could play all of Beethoven's compositions about 277,000 times.
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