Kampar Peninsula biodiversity sightings
01 / 06: A shared map
Kampar
Peninsula
What lives here? Each dot marks something a person saw in the Kampar Peninsula. They shared it on iNaturalist.
Scroll to see what all 10,461 sightings reveal.
First sort what people found
The sightings show many kinds of life
The dots gather into groups such as plants and birds. They also show insects and mammals. Fungi and reptiles appear too. One shared photo becomes part of a larger picture.
What did everyone find?
People recorded thousands of different living things
The dots now gather by taxon. A taxon is the name used to identify a living thing. The project contains 3,120 taxon IDs.
The record grows
More sightings joined the record each year
The first sighting was shared in 2002. The biggest rise began in 2025. People shared 3,570 sightings that year. The total for 2024 was 298. By September 2026 people had already shared 4,744 more. I am excited to see what future visits will reveal.
Who shared the sightings?
Ninety-two people shaped this record
Ninety-two people contributed to this project. They visited different places and noticed different forms of life. Each person recorded something that others might have missed.
Bring the records back together
Their separate sightings become one shared map
All 10,461 dots now return to the map. No single person recorded every place or every kind of life. Each person added what they saw. Citizen science joins those records into a view that everyone can learn from.
Look more closely at the taxa
The Canopy of Life
Each of the 3,120 leaves represents one taxon ID. The 14 large branches show broad groups of life. Smaller branches connect taxa that share a genus name. Colour identifies the group. Leaf size shows the number of sightings. Hover over a leaf or select it to learn more.
Leaf size shows how often a taxon appears in this project. It does not show how common that organism is in the forest.
How often was each taxon seen?
Most taxa were seen only once or twice
Most taxon IDs appear in only one or two sightings. A smaller group appears many times. Only 31% were seen at least three times. Yet they make up 75% of all sightings. Only nine taxon IDs were seen 50 times or more.
A taxon seen once may not be rare. It may be hard to find. It is also possible that no one looked again.
Here “taxon” means one distinct taxon ID in the export. It does not always mean a species.
How much did each person share?
Some people added many more sightings than others
Some people shared thousands of sightings. Others shared only one or two. Every record helps us see a little more.
This is not a ranking of skill or importance. It only shows how many records each person added to this project.
Connect people with what they found
Different people noticed different kinds of life
Each line connects a person with a taxon they recorded. The full set of lines shows how many trips and interests can build one shared picture.
The record grows because each person notices something a little different.
These lines connect people to their records. They do not show relationships between organisms.
Only the most active observers and the most often seen taxa are named here. This keeps the lines readable. The opening transformation still includes every sighting.
Where did people go?
Bright places are places people visited
Use the buttons to compare taxa with sightings. You can also compare people and visit days. Bright places received more visits. Dark places may simply have fewer records.
Taxa recorded in each 5 km cell.
Each hexagon covers a 5 km cell. This map shows where people made records. It does not show how many organisms truly live there.
What happens when people keep looking?
The shared record keeps growing
Every visit can add a new sighting. Sometimes it adds a taxon that had never appeared in this project before.
A taxon is “new” here only when it first appears in this project. It may have lived in Kampar long before someone recorded it.
What citizen science can do
One sighting can become
shared knowledge
This project contains 10,461 sightings and 3,120 taxon IDs. The records came from 92 people. Each record began with a simple act. Someone noticed a living thing and chose to share it.
The narrowing bars show the steps every record must pass through. The bar widths are examples. They are not measured percentages.
Citizen science cannot show everything. It shows what people noticed. It also shows what they could record and share.
Behind every dot
Every dot began when someone met a living thing
A sighting may look like one small mark on a screen. It began with a real encounter. A person stopped to look. They took a photo and shared what they found.
These photographs come from iNaturalist records that allow reuse. Credits and licenses are shown with each image.
What lives in Kampar?
We do not know
everything
Together we can see much more than one person could.