Acceptable use of iNat - bulk upload 2000 tree photos.
I have > 1000 images of a particular species of tree, plus all its variants - live, dead, fallen, damaged, browsed, borer frass, individual trees or details, and hillsides full. I have photos taken within a few meters, plus some from up to a km away.
I want to get the images and meta data (lat & long, date, etc) into the Atlas of Living Australia. (ALA)
Although I have no doubt as to species ID, they need a seconder to become “Research Grade”. I’m sure nobody is going to sit and ID 2000 of the same thing. Is there a facility to “Batch ID”, similar to “Batch upload”?
Currently there is no Agree All function on the Identify page. Unless your taxon has a specialist, it is unlikely that even 50% of your observations will be identified.
One user has 25000 observations of Creosote Bushes, so 2000 is nowhere near that. As long as they are separate individuals it is okay, just don’t expect to get a lot of RG observations.
I agree. If it’s a common tree, the average IDing Joe will probably come across a handful of them, and a good portion will get RG, but unless somebody regularly checks on the taxon to ID to species, they are gonna sit for awhile. Also perfectly reasonable to upload a ton of observations, as long as they are different individuals. There’s a case to be made for reporting the same individual under different circumstances, such as a disease’s progression or just growth, but ofc 2000 of the same individual would be practically unhelpful outside of a specific study requiring daily or more frequent recording instances of a certain feature.
I use iNat Classic for iOS and the limit is 20 on there (I hit it pretty often when uploading microbes, because I don’t have the equipment for proper focus stacking, so I post a bunch of images to up the odds that one of them has important anatomical features in-focus) I wonder if the difference is iOS vs Android or Classic vs the new app.
I see no problem with your uploading your 2000 tree photos if: each photo (or set of photos to be uploaded as one) is reasonably labeled as a single species; all observations have location, date, and some reasonable chance to be identified; you don’t post individual tree A as more than one observation per day (post all you want from different days). However, if your goal is to get the photos into ALA you may find it simpler to upload them directly there. Also, iNaturalist will probably resize your photos, another reason going direct to ALA might meet your goals better.
It’s probably an acceptable use, although as others have pointed out it’s not necessarily the best way to do what you’re aiming to do. However, if you or anyone else does end up doing a batch upload at this scale I think it would be polite to maybe put some time into doing IDs in that area/taxon, since if you’ve got that many photos of the taxon you probably know it well enough to do so. A big batch upload like that puts a big load on your IDers, so it’s nice to help offset that for them.
They said that this kind of dataset would be one they’d strongly recommend submitting to another repository that then feeds into the ALA, rather than accepting it themselves directly, as:
it involves a single species
it contains a relatively small number of records (not tens or hundreds of thousands)
depending on location - perhaps not widely spread spatially