If that ever happens, I’m out.
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Filled map doesn’t mean everything is mapped, like in a top-observed city tight now tou can go and find tons of new species and for sure far forests and deserts will take much more than 100 years to have all species listed on a small grid.
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I think the data on iNaturalist will play an increasingly important role in the future, whether iNaturalist will still be around a hundred years from now or whether the data will be stored elsewhere. Perhaps this data will also form the basis of an even better system in the future.
I just hope that this data will survive us and that this amount of data will be of great use to future generations and above all to nature.
I see a problem with iNaturalist in the increasing amounts of data that are being produced with observations of cultivated plants and animals that are not scientifically relevant.
I can hardly imagine what dimensions this would have in 100 years.
However, one of the biggest problems with iNaturalist are the many incorrect determinations, which unfortunately are often also caused by the artificial intelligence.
Unfortunately, identification will probably continue to be problematic in the future and will require many specialists.
Part of the problem is that the algorithms learn from user identifications. However, these are often wrong and therefore such an AI will never be able to make completely reliable determinations. In addition, many observations are practically useless for a precise evaluation, because important features are often not recognizable on many images.
On the other hand, many historical sources are also full of errors and they are also of immense importance for our scientific understanding of nature today. I am so glad that many of the historical sources are now freely available to almost everyone. This is absolutely brilliant, we actually already have access to so much knowledge that we are often overwhelmed with it and have to learn how to deal with it.
Even if robots may replace us in many areas in the future, there is certainly still a lot to learn and work in biology and nature conservation.
However, this only applies if there is still something to protect by then and we have not yet eradicated most of the species.
When I watch the news I’m not sure if we’re even talking about a hundred years anymore. We are just too many people on earth and we act like we are waging a war against nature. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re going to “win”…
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Yes, digital data conservation in a context of environmental collapse (and therefore failing states) is an issue for all the knowledge being stored exclusively in digital format.
Maybe some visionary will print a massive encyclopedia with all the Inat data just in time so that the science is passed on in the post-digital world? That is a lot of volumes.
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I’m not sure I can speak for the community but personally I think it would be great to have more annotation options and corresponding filters for existing observations and more data analysis tools built into iNat similar to what you can already do with e.g. phenology graphs. There are a ton of observations, and it looks like they are still set to increase exponentially over time, so I suspect sorting the useful ones from the background noise will become more and more challenging over time. I would hope for additional tools to make that easier in a future with a significantly larger database.
Yes, I see that as a bottleneck as well. It already is, and it will likely only get more limiting as the number of observations increases. Quality control of identifications is often missing, too - once something has made it to RG, especially for those taxa that are harder to ID, usually that’s it and errors can stick around for many years. I’ve found some misidentifications on RG observations from 6-7 years ago. These feed into the CV algorithm, limiting its reliability. With a lower number of identifiers vs. observers and many taxa not having a dedicated expert looking through them, this challenge is unlikely to get resolved soon. I suspect it will be increasingly the job of any researcher wanting to use iNat data to do some selection and quality control.
In the future, it would be nice to see some measure of confidence on IDs that goes beyond the current CID system. Most observations at RG just have two IDs, the observer’s (often based on CV suggestion), and one more person from the community. It would be nice to see more levels, e.g. RG1, RG2, RG3, to allow researcher to better gauge the quality of IDs as well as being more selective with the training set for the CV to improve its accuracy.
Along with that, I would also hope for some sort of quality assessment tools for older identifications, maybe being able to filter for observations where current CV suggestions (hopefully improved and better than in the past) disagree with CID to help identify issues with previous CV training or older observations hanging around with a wrong ID at RG.
Of course all this takes money and time to develop, so I worry most about availability of funding and continued public interest in spending money on this sort of thing. I think it’s awesome that iNat is free to use and doesn’t bombard us with ads and would love to see it sticking around like that for a good while. I wonder about the sustainability of that though. I’ve seen too many sites, including data repositories for research, go the way from free to supported by ads to subscription-based requiring a fee to being bought by some tech giant and either done away with because it didn’t make a profit or completely redesigned to be something else entirely. I sincerely hope that won’t be iNat’s fate and that the community can come together to do whatever it takes to keep it going for at least a couple more decades or even a century.
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Without the women and their knowledge about gathering, our ancestors would have died of starvation. That knowledge for survival is effectively innate.
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If it is me and the observer, I tag in a trusted identifier … then between the 3 of us I feel it equals ‘2 is Research Grade’.
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No. It is learned cultural knowledge. Knowing what and how to hunt or gather in the Kalahari won’t help you if you suddenly find yourself in the Canadian arctic. Just being female won’t help either. There is no such thing as a gathering gene.
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Thanks. For mansplaining.
The point was that it is the women who DO the gathering.
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Actually in hunter-gathering communities everybody gathered, females were rarely involved in hunting big prey, so they spent more time gathering, while men certainly knew (and know now) what they can eat around them and how to get it, every person had to have enough knowledge to survive. Our ancestors would do just fine in getting food if all females suddenly lost all their memory.
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Please stay on topic, folks.
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H-m-m-m, as far as iNat goes, I’m just happy with the present. Maybe in 5 years or ten years AI identifications are even more accurate? We have a way to take and load 3-d images? iNat becomes even more of a teaching tool with actual online classes about specific subjects that users can choose to take? I don’t know–good question. I suspect we can’t even imagine what technology will exist in 10 years and what impact that technology will have on the site.
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Interesting coincidence that you mentioned this. I was just envisioning a world where humans – one of the last surviving life forms on a largely barren earth – subsist on synthesized food, and iNaturalist data has morphed into the templates for a holodeck-like projection where we spend most of our time. Whatever used to be the most often uploaded taxon in that part of the world is now the most common taxon in the holographic version, as the frequency of occurrence of uploads is the algorithm for frequency of occurrence of projections.
To see range maps that are really accurate as opposed to the guesses that exist in most field guides would be great. To combine the doom and gloom aspect people looking at the maps in 100 years will sit back and be amazed that people were able to see Species A in X spot. Some will be looked at as we look at the Passenger Pigeon range map from the 1800’s.
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On iNaturalist’s 100-year anniversary the new mobile app is released (see: iNaturalist Mobile App Development News) and celebrated on the forum: everyone is proud of the developers, but most users still prefer to use the website because the think-it brain-based shortcut is faster…
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