Have you added anything to the Great Nature Project lately? You might want to consider adding some of your favorite photos because we are highlighting one exciting photo contributed to the Great Nature Project each weekday. Some of you have had one or more photos highlighted already. We'd like to highlight more photos from iNaturalist!

Each weekday we share a link to the Pic of the Day on our National Geographic Education Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/natgeoeducation) and it also appears on the lower left of our homepage at www.greatnatureproject.org. In the coming months, we're hoping to improve the quality of photos and the stories we share about the observations.

Be sure to see what it looks like at www.greatnatureproject.org if you log in with your iNaturalist credentials. Above all, have fun exploring!

iNaturalist by default has useful summaries available for each project as a whole (Checklist of Taxa, Project Stats, and Leaderboard), but I thought it would be fun to run some numbers based on 2014 alone.

iNaturalist revealed a great new map for all >1 million observations on the site, but it's not available yet at the project level. Therefore, I thought I'd make a few maps myself showing where observations in the Great Nature Project came from in 2014.

Map of the world

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. has the most observations by far (>18,000). Mexico is second with >2700. Then India, Peru, and Italy each have >200. You can't see it on the map, but Mauritius had almost as many observations as the whole United Kingdom last year, thanks single-handedly to rinahart169. Thanks, Varina!

As far as the 50 United States plus Washington, DC and Puerto Rico are concerned for 2014, the top and bottom rankings are:
The Top States!
California (>6500)
Texas (>5200)
Vermont (1800) (especially impressive since it's the second smallest by population)

The Bottom States (all with fewer than 5 observations in the Great Nature Project):
Montana
Connecticut
Kansas
Indiana
Utah
Delaware
Hawaii
Rhode Island (zilch! And there are over a million people there!)
Oklahoma (zero! And almost 4 million people there!)
Puerto Rico (nada! not a state, but nearly ties with Oklahoma for population)

Do you live in any of the dozens of un/under-represented countries or states? Planning any travel to those areas in 2015? Make sure you share your observations of biodiversity!

Most of the top contributors to the Great Nature Project are top contributors to iNaturalist overall, but I want to highlight top contributors to the Great Nature Project who joined iNaturalist more recently. These folks uploaded their first observation to iNaturalist in the last year or so, and each has added several hundred observations to the Great Nature Project. Quite an impressive start for each of them!

asemerdj- 632 observations and 394 taxa!
corbanhemphill- 484 observations and 343 taxa.
allenbartell- 496 observations and 232 taxa.

What was your favorite sighting in 2014? What do you look forward to seeing in 2015? My most interesting observation of 2014 was a fisher (first in Maryland on iNat!), but sadly I saw it as roadkill. In 2015 I look forward to seeing everything that you add to the Great Nature Project!

Thank you all for your interest in the Great Nature Project! We have exciting plans in store for 2015 and wish you all the best in the new year!

Have fun exploring!