Onboarding new users is such a key component. I’ve probably run my mouth dry telling everyone at my organization that yes, iNat is simple to use, but it takes practice and guidance and everyone can benefit from knowledgeable instructor or mentor.
Re: iNat & school kids. iNat can be a very powerful tool for young people in school and that it needs a long on-ramp. In my professional capacity, my team has had the most success with long-term youth programs, where the participants get clear prompts for their observations and are given specific instructions and feedback. Their iNat lessons come with a lot of natural history context that we supplement with nature journaling, reflection, and games. In other words, iNat is a enrichment to an already strong environmental education program, not a replacement or shortcut.
Is it possible to create a “Commonly Cultivated” collection project and use that as an exclusion filter while using the identify modal - ¬_in_project=commonly-cultivated?
This is a problem and its frustrating. Unfortunately, there is no solution. I used to fret over it. Now I take it as another opportunity to take a deep breath and practice calmness.
As @dianastuder says, there is the additional problem that if I mark a plant as cultivated, it may never get an ID. Separate the cultivated/not from the needs ID/not categories! (To admins who have heard this from me before: another opportunity for to take a deep breath and practice calmness.)
Yes it is true this has been discussed before, but why is talking about it again bad? The implicit ban on repeating topics is one of the things I dislike most about the forum. If people want to bring up an old subject again, I find nothing wrong with that, and those who find the repetition tedious can simply not participate. Maybe the mods are required to read all the threads, I don’t know, but surely they aren’t required to reply if they’d rather not.
No, I mean accumulating everything in one post is much better than many posts where everything is lost after a month, there’s no “ban” on topis, they’re merged together. I don’t get the mod part though, maybe you’re talking with someone else.
No, what I mean I never saw a mod commenting where they didn’t want and in fact if modertors would take action on each duplicating topic, it would take their whole time 24/7, but big topics worth merging and old comments worth reading.
That’s a novel suggestion! I like it. Although I suppose if the species are well-known enough to enter into a collection project, teaching the automatic algorithm to mark them may be a more direct way to go.
Or maybe the collection project could be used as a means of pooling the relevant obs for marking en masse, with the end goal that eventually the algorithm will take over and make the project obsolete.
I get what you are saying. I record a lot of pollinators around my home - it is one of my main goals. While I do not go so far as identifying the plants, I am confident that about 96% of the 111 recorded arthropod species that I have recorded here so far are being hosted by cultivated/introduced plants - even the weeds. These plants are currently part of the ecosystem of the fauna.
iNat is able to mark some plants as Introduced. That helps (but only once it has an ID to weigh up)
A Commonly Cultivated option would need to be tied to geography. Your Texas bluebonnets, my invasive alien escaped from an agricultural crop of lupins.
Totally… and if we want to encourage urban areas to be better at supporting wildlife, its important to have data on what is and isn’t in play in urban ecosystems…much of which will be cultivated plants. Its very visible in my town that a lot of the roadside plants typically cultivated in UK towns don’t attract pollinators. But we need as much data as possible on which plants do support which species (whether cultivated or not) in order to make the arguments for cultivating the correct species down the line.
This, so much this. I ran into this when I started on the site this past May. However it was me who was the offender. I ran into what seemed to be a Hosta (according to CV) growing along a stream bank. This plant was clearly not cultivated and was also “wild” in the sense that it was not intentionally planted along this stream. I uploaded the observation with the CV recommended ID and it immediately marked it as Casual. This was quite frustrating as I was hoping to get some help making sure that it was indeed actually a Hosta volunteer or not. After messing around with things for a bit I realized that I could game the system by changing the ID away from the CV recommendation to a higher taxa.
For this particular case the fact that it was not possible to ever have something in that particular taxa as anything other than Casual was frankly ridiculous. Seems like a conflation of native/non-native and cultivated/wild.
My $0.02 (20+ years of building software) is that solving this with on-boarding is not going to work. Clearly there is a popular use case (maybe more) that is poorly covered by the site. As long as this is true, frustration will be sown on both sides (the people creating the bad data as well as the people who want the data to be good).
Maybe not helpful but there is the opportunity in the DQA ( Data Quality Assessment) to counter the automated systems negative vote of Organism is wild. One may also wish to make a statement to this in their notes so that hopefully future identifiers are aware of your rationale.
There could be a parallel project that is Commonly Invasive. Both could be regional/geographic collection projects that would each be tied into separate umbrella projects. Identifiers could then use any of those as their inclusion or exclusion filter.
When you upload an observation of a taxa that is only present nearby in observations overwhelmingly marked captive/cultivated, the system automatically applies a vote of captive/cultivated… It only takes a single vote the other way to restore the balance, and any balanced vote outcome will default to wild. Clear comments or description in ambiguous situations will go a long way to stopping well meaning identifiers from pushing things the wrong way :)
But none of this is obvious to any other than a seasoned user of the site. That is really my point. Now I know how to defeat the system the “correct” way, but as a new user I had no idea and grew very frustrated. I realize that this issue seems opposite of the issue originally raised, but I was more trying to make the larger point that this is not an on-boarding issue but a larger issue with the way the site presents information/options vs how people use it.
Are you suggesting that it would be better if we didn’t need to help each other learn to use the system? Keep in mind that one of iNaturalist s missions is to build community, and it is actually a strong community building function of helping each other learn to use the system …