The Regulars 2015-11-05

It's easy to see who has the most observations and identifications on iNat, but it's not so easy to see at a glance who the regulars are, the people who observe consistently over time, or who use the site consistently over time. So I decided to run some numbers and make some charts.

Here are the people with the most days where they made at least one observation with a photo, one dot per day (if you click through you’ll get a chart you can zoom and pan like a Google Map):

So, some things

• Greg has done an *amazing* job entering a backlog of photos spanning 4.5 decades
  
• most of our consistent users didn't start out that way
  
• jmaughn is on an amazing streak (keep zooming in on him)

To be honest, jmaughn's streak is kind of what got me into this. I was looking at his calendar and realized he's coming up on 3 years of adding an observation every single day. I ran these numbers, so here are the top couple streaks on iNat, where a streak is a period of days where the user has at least one observation per day (I ran these last week so they're already out of date):

At 900+ observation days, Jim is destroying the rest of us. Totally amazing. And if you actually look at his observations, he's not just posting one a day.

I was also curious about site usage instead of field time, so I made the same chart except using date of observation creation instead of date observed:

And I did the same with identifications by creation date:

What surprises me (again) is that I'm *not* at the top of the observation creation days: jmaughn is! Even though there were years when not many people were using the site other than me.

Colophon

For the curious, I used the D3-based EventDrops for these visualizations. My code is at https://github.com/kueda/inat-days. The interactivity is a bit sluggish, so if anyone has thoughts on improvement, please holler on github.

Posted on July 23, 2020 02:28 AM by hannahsun99