I recently listened to a fascinating podcast about the naturalist community in Japan, specifically the entomology fanatics. However, when I look at iNaturalist statistics for Japan, there appear to be very few observations/observers/identifiers given the population and level of development.
This figure shows the number of Observations, Observers, and Identifiers for select countries that have similar populations. Japan (red X) is way below the trend lines for all 3 metrics. The full dataset can be explored interactively on Tableau.
Interestingly, South Korea (blue triangle) clusters with Japan, although South Korea has a population that is less than 1/2 that of Japan.
Based on feedback from the iNat forum, it seems likely that nature-nerds in some of these countries are using other platforms to record their observations.
However, if they are using other platforms, they do not record data in a universal format that is indexed in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF):
This chart shows GBIF records from Japan.
Hopefully over time more people will discover iNaturalist to record their natural history observations!
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