Diario de alexshepard

Continuing with my d3 & data visualization experiments, here's a chart race of iNaturalist Observations from 2008 to 2022, for US States.

Still working on how to best embed an external data viz like this into an iNaturalist journal post.

I've been personally interested in digital and generative art for a long time. In art school I did a bunch of work in Processing, and I've also done generative art in p5js and swift. Lately I've been getting into data visualization, just for fun. For the most part I've just goofing around with d3.

I've always liked the contributions visualization on the GitHub profile page, and I thought it'd be fun to try to re-create this in d3, but visualizing iNat observations instead of GitHub checkins. So this weekend I whipped something up in d3, just for fun.

Here's what my activity chart for 2022 looks like. Pretty grim, I've been a bad naturalist this year.

Let's see what some of my co-workers have been up to.

Here's @tiwane:

Here's our fearless leader, @kueda:

And here's @sambiology, making us look like slackers:

Well, at least @carrieseltzer from the iNat team has been super consistent:

Hi folks, I'll be participating in the Walk to End Alzheimer's this year. As some of you know, my father suffers from Alzheimer's. Because it runs in families, I may face it myself as I grow older.

Please don't feel any pressure to donate, but if you're able to consider a tax-deductible donation towards a good cause this year, here's my fundraising page: http://act.alz.org/site/TR?fr_id=15425&pg=personal&px=21536111

Hi folks,

We released iOS app version 2.7.15 yesterday, which has a fix for layout issues in the camera. It’s also got some updated translations, a new Donate button in Settings, and some other minor updates.

As always, please report bugs here or in the Google Group or to help@inaturalist.org.

Happy holidays! I’m in Kitsap County, Washington visiting my Mom for the week, seeing lots of fungi.

Best,
alex

On May 31, we released version 2.7.8 of the iNaturalist iOS app. It contains a bunch of updated translations for many languages, and one new language, Romanian. Thanks again to the iNat volunteer translators!

The other change in version 2.7.8 is an updated URL for the NatureWatchNZ partner site.

As usual, if you find anything wrong with the iOS app, please let me know here or in our Google Group, or by emailing help@inaturalist.org.

On April 26th, 2018 we released version 2.7.7 of the iNaturalist iOS app. The main change in this version is four new translations: Czech, Danish, German and Turkish. Thank you to the iNat volunteer translators!

Our mobile translations are done on a platform called CrowdIn. If you find a mistranslation, or if you are bilingual and want to help make iNat work in a language that we don’t support yet, please join our translation effort here: iNaturalist Mobile on CrowdIn.

In other iOS news, iNaturalist was App of the Day on the iOS App Store last week. Apple wrote a nice story on how iNat works and also made a delightful animated illustration to accompany the story. We got a nice bump in new users from it, just in time for City Nature Challenge.

As usual, if you find anything wrong with the iOS app, please let me know here or in our Google Group.

Ever since Seek was released I've started thinking more about new species to see, more than just making new observations. Seek will give you the most common species around you, filtered by what you've seen in Seek, but it's not integrated with iNaturalist (yet). On Android you can get the most common species that you haven't already seen on iNaturalist using a feature called Missions, but we don't have that on iOS yet either. So I'm using the web to come up with my list.

Here's the URL I use to come up with my species challenges for the week:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?lat=37.78&lng=-122.46&radius=70&month=3,4,5&unobserved_by_user_id=alexshepard&view=species

You can generate yours by editing lat=37.78 and lng=-122.46 to include the coordinates of your location and editing unobserved_by_user_id=alexshepard to include your iNat username. This also only shows species seen in March, April or May. If you want to use this at another time of year, you might want to edit the month=3,4,5 part of the URL.

Here are my challenges for the next week:

And attached to this post are observations for the challenges I made for myself last week. I went out looking for these five species this past week, and got them all. I'm particularly proud of the Scarlet Pimpernel, because I'm red-green color blind so I'll never notice those flowers in the wild.

Hi folks,

I released 2.7.6 of iNaturalist for iOS yesterday. What's new that you'll see in the app:

• We should now display the taxon names for observations on the Me tab in your device's language, if the names are available
• Lots of translation updates
• Updates to login screen which hopefully help people find the "already have an account button" (#424)
• New tab bar icons (#418)
• You can now copy taxon names from the taxon details screen, either by tapping on the taxon name or by the new share button (#389)
• If you've been suspended from iNat, first of all shame on you 😉 but second of all the app will at least tell you (#420)
• Fixed location of the dots on the intro slideshow on iPad (#421)

Some under the hood things that are new in this release:

• Upgraded to the latest facebook SDK for login, if you're into that kind of thing.
• Switched the way we determine network reachability (in and out of service range, offline/offline, etc) to use a newer framework.
• Switched to using the iNaturalist Node API for marking updates as seen, agreeing to IDs, and making IDs

As always, please let us know if you run into any problems, preferably by emailing help@inaturalist.org or posting on our Google Group.

Thanks,
alex

Hi folks,

The iNaturalist team recently got a great opportunity to work with the folks at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Tangled Bank Studios on a new app to be released in tandem with their film Backyard Wilderness. They wanted a kid-friendly app that was all about discovering the nature around you. Sounds a lot like iNat, huh? 😀

So we built an iOS app called Seek on top of the iNaturalist APIs, with a few important differences compared to the existing iNaturalist apps. Observations contain some sensitive information that we don't want to reveal about children, including where they are and when they are active (in the US it's actually illegal under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) for online platforms to record this information without explicit parental consent). Because the app is designed to be kid-friendly, we don't record any observation information. No activity in this new app becomes a record on inaturalist.org, but it uses the same computer vision model as iNaturalist to suggest identifications based on photographs taken by the users. It also suggests species that have been found in the area (based on an obscured location) and recorded on iNaturalist. Seek works because of the observations submitted and identified by the iNaturalist community, so it might work best in areas with active iNaturalist communities.

We're hopeful this app will be fun, and not just for kids. Please try it yourself, and please encourage any of your friends and family who are into nature to give it a try.

It's currently iOS only. You can download it from the iOS App Store here: Seek by iNaturalist. We'll be exploring how to make an Android version soon.

Cheers,
alex

One of the many cool things about the New Observation Search is that it's now really easy for me to tell who's added the most IDs to my observations.

In order to see who's made the most IDs on your observations, do the following:

• navigate to the new observation search UI at http://www.inaturalist.org/observations,
• click the filters button (next to the big red Go button, it looks a little like a sideways equalizer) to open the filter menu,
• click the "your observations" checkbox to filter for only your observations,
• click Update Search and close the filter menu
• click on Identifiers to see a sorted list of who's made Identifications on your observations!

You should see a list like this, except probably with a lot more observations, right? :)





So without further ado, thanks to the top 10 IDers of my 629 observations: @loarie @kueda @kevinhintsa @sambiology @temminicki @john8 @robberfly @silversea_starsong @maractwin and @rudyard.