I like to browse iNaturalist and see what people are finding, but sometimes I wonder what I could find. What’s visible near me? If you’ve ever wondered the same, we have a tool that might be of help.

Hot Botany Near You, is a tool to find out what people are observing and recording on iNaturalist near you. If you visit the page, you’ll see a search box and a map. You can either click on the map, or use the search box to set a location. If you live in New Zealand you might have to grab the map to bring the islands into view and zoom, but the search box will work if you type in Dunedin, Shanghai, or Llanfairpwllgwyngyll. If you search for somewhere like Springfield, you might find it helpful to specify Springfield, UK, or Springfield, SC as there are a lot of Springfields.

Once you’ve done that click ‘search’ and wait while the page searches through iNaturalist data to bring your results.

What comes back are three lists. The first is a list of plants that have been observed in the past fourteen days. You’ll see a photo, the common name and scientific name. There’ll be a note of how many observations there have been this year. You’ll also see some dots. This will tell you historically how often this plant is observed around this time of year. You can also view the observations of the plant on iNaturalist, if you want more details.

Last comes a list of predictions. Today is the twenty-first of March. What is observed between March 21 and April 4 usually? The script looks at historical data up to six years ago, and pulls a list of plants that are usually observed around this period, that haven’t been observed yet. It’ll also give you some guidance as to how often a plant is observed, whether it’s every year, most years or maybe just some years. The assumption here is that if a plant is getting a lot of observations, it’s doing something interesting, like flowering or fruiting.

In between are plants that have a few observations now, but are likely to have more in the near future.The idea here is that this set of results would catch targets for observations that should be just coming into view. Tests have shown this doesn’t work so well in the tropics, so this might be a case of temperate assumptions not working well, or else it might simply be a lack of data.

Data quantity is a problem for this system. It works if you live somewhere where there are a lot of iNaturalist users, but what if you live somewhere there isn’t?

If you try Nuuk, in Greenland, you’ll see a lot fewer observations. There are a couple of things you could try. One is increasing the search radius. The default is set to 50km, but you find more observations if you expand it to 100km. You can also reduce the radius if you want hyperlocal results. Another thing you can try is expanding the prediction out to four weeks instead of two. There’s a bit of a trade-off in predictions if you do this. You will catch more observations if you live somewhere where there are few observers, like Nuuk. However, if you live somewhere where conditions change a lot over a month, so the start of April is not like the end of April, then you’ll catch a lot of premature observations, which I’m guessing would also happen in Nuuk.

If you press the artist's palette emoji at the bottom-right of each result card, you'll go to the Trading Card Generator which will create a card for your result.

In the longer term, you can improve predictions by getting out and making observations that you record on the iNaturalist app, so next year is better informed. While it’s nice to see what people are reporting, there’s still no substitute for getting out and seeing plants yourself.