The Effect of COVID-19 Lockdowns on Uploads to iNaturalist in New York City
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in stay-at-home orders that have drastically changed our interaction with the outdoors. As locations of indoor gathering paused in-person operations due to enactment of Governor Cuomo’s “New York State on PAUSE” executive order on March 22, 2020, many people in New York City opted to increase their interaction with urban nature. The literature suggests that there are positive relationships between nature dose and mental and social health and that there has been increased engagement with the outdoors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, our hypothesis is that there has been an increase in the spotting and uploading of organisms to iNaturalist, an online social network for sharing biodiversity information, in New York City during the COVID-19 lockdown. We collected data from iNaturalist and compared the number and types of uploads in the six months surrounding the height of the pandemic in NYC to the corresponding six months of the previous year. Our results indicate there was no statistically significant difference between the two years, which may be due to the types of variables we analyzed and flexibility of iNaturalist upload categories. For future research, we would like to apply other methods of statistical analysis and to examine trends in other biodiversity websites.
Group members: Jasmine Kaur, Abiha Kazmi, Stella Mathew, Ngawang Rinchen, Adina Scheinfeld
It is amazing to me that there is no statistical difference! I thought that there would definitely be a negative impact on the uploads since no one wants to go out, which is different from your hypothesis! It is so interesting to see the difference in perspective! Amazing job!
I’m also surprised by the lack of statistical difference – I expected uploads to increase as more people are now spending time in nature. When downloading iNaturalist for the BioBlitz, I was curious about how many people used the app, and how many observations were made on average. I also wonder what caused the spike on the observations in 2019.