What does one million nature observations look like?

Jonathan Hiew is a self-described walker and cyclist from Singapore to whom nature photography only comes naturally when he is desperate to find the names of those flowers he sees along the way. On Friday, Jonathan (aka techieoldfox) made an impromptu decision to take a hike through the Central Cachement Nature Reserve – he’d been rained out on his last try. The hike produced several pictures of butterflies, wasps, a grasshopper, and a cricket. But one of Jonathan’s butterflies was special. It marked the one millionth observation posted to iNaturalist.

But what does one million observations look like? To find out, we’re marking the occasion by launching a new series of interactive maps that, for the first time, allow all of these observations to be visualized together.

When you’re zoomed out, the maps summarize the observations as a grid. The darker the grid cell, the more observations it contains. All observations not flagged as captive or as having location issues are mapped. Observations with geoprivacy set to obscured are only included at coarse zoom levels.



At very fine zoom levels, the grid cells are replaced by individual, clickable observations. The colors indicate the branch of the tree of life that each observation represents. White borders indicate ‘research quality’ observations.

We hope you enjoy these maps. The software driving them was prepared by our collaborators at Centre de Recerca Ecològica i Aplicacions Forestals earlier this year. But it took the support of our new home at the California Academy of Sciences including lots of hard work by Patrick Leary and iNat’s new beefed-up backend to share them with everyone.

Some cool maps:

American Alligator

Ladybird Beetles

San Francisco Bay Area