iNaturalist will be offline for about 30 minutes beginning at 9 pm Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday, September 29 (4am UTC/Sept 30) . Click here to see this translated into your time zone. During this time, you will not be able to post observations from the mobile apps or interact with the website or API in any way. The iNatForum will still be active.
We scheduled maintenance just a few weeks ago in September but realized we needed a little more time than planned. Maintenance is usually scheduled every few months so we can update our infrastructure and better support our growing community. This extra window of downtime is unusual, but it will be short. We know this may be an inconvenience, so we’re letting you know ahead of time so you can make other plans. Thank you for your patience and understanding!
Is there anything that actually competes with INaturalist, given that INaturalist isn’t selling a service and isn’t mutually exclusive with anything else?
Why should I point iNat towards the nicer things on market? ;)
The update time is allways plant to 6 o clock in the morning local time. It should be possible to vary the time for updates, that every part of the world sometimes is “bothered”.
Well, anything that’s even remotely like INat relies on having a lot of users available to make IDs and observations, so in theory you’d want people joining whatever other versions you’ve found.
I don’t know for sure, as it’s not my field, but I suspect downtime needs to happen when at least a majority of relevant staff are available. It wouldn’t be very nice of them to make staff wake up at 3am in the interest of varying when half an hour of inconvenience happens.
Just a nit I noticed (13:30 PDT Sep 27): the outage announcement at inaturalist.org/home includes a remnant of the UTC time from the mid-September outage.
"iNaturalist will be offline
for a half hour
beginning Tuesday, September 29 at 9pm Pacific Daylight Time (4am UTC/Sep 17) (convert to your local time)."
I am always really impressed at your long and accurate advance warnings. I put them on my calendar and prepare myself with attractive distractions:) Also, after some new bugs appearing I expected some tweaking and appreciate your work.
There are a number of other citizen science platforms where people can upload biodiversity data. Many of them have a regional focus – e.g., there are several in Europe (Observation, Naturgucker) which would be relevant for someone in Switzerland (CH) – and they are pretty much all free to use. Or there are taxon-focused platforms like eBird, Ornitho, Xeno-Canto, BugGuide, etc.
Not sure what you mean by “not mutually exclusive”, but I think it is reasonable to consider them competitors with iNaturalist, in the sense that most observers will focus their energy on one platform rather than uploading the same data to multiple places. Even if the goal is not to have the most active users or most observations, a platform like iNaturalist is likely to work best if the community has a certain minimum level of activity, so competition for users from other websites is not necessarily an irrelevant problem, particularly in the case of identification expertise (see below).
While there is unlikely to be a shortage of observers, the available specialist capacity for identifying many of the more challenging taxa is finite. If these people are spending their time on one platform, they will have less time available to identify on another platform. So specialists who identify because they wish to use or improve the data may well give some thought to which platform provides the greatest benefits for their effort. In most cases, the process of validating observations is likely to be different – iNat is rather unusual in that anyone can suggest an ID and it calculates IDs based on majority vote, whereas on many other similar platforms only designated users can validate and correct IDs. Not all platforms have an AI-based ID suggestion algorithm, meaning that there may be fewer incorrect IDs entered by observers. Some identifiers may find another one of these systems is preferable or works better for their purpose.
Fair enough, I can take that definition of “competition”.
By “not mutually exclusive”, I meant that using INat doesn’t mean someone can’t use anything else, and vice versa. You’re right that people tend to focus mainly on one, but someone can use, for example, INat and EBird both- nothing forces them to choose only one.
And I do maintain that “I found something I like better than INat, but I’m not going to tell INat about it, winky face” (a follow-up comment I replied to) is… still a bit silly, honestly? Given that other people joining the site ought to be neutral-at-worst for the average user.
as a dedicated Identifier, I personally hate and resent every single new user who isn’t a power-identifier like me. I can tolerate a Master’s but really, only people with Doctorates in Biology and 10+ years of field experience should be allowed to join iNaturalist as new users!!!
(that was sarcasm. balancing observation and identification is a nuanced thing and I am regularly introducing people to iNaturalist)
