I’m working on quite a few research products enabled by iNaturalist data, and I want to be able to share back to the observers and identifiers that their data enabled this work.
GBIF collects the citations of DOIs containing iNaturalist data, so you can see the scientific products enabled by iNaturalist collectively, but you can’t search this for observer or identifier.
The project Bloodhound takes GBIF citations and connects them back to the original observer or identifier, but only for preserved specimens, living specimens, and fossil specimens. However, the code is available and could be repurposed to do the same thing to link back to iNaturalist users (which should, in theory, be pretty straightforward compared to the Bloodhound use case since the names are consistent).
You could imagine that on a user’s profile page a counter of ‘Science Enabled’ just like observations or identifications, and a landing page to look through all the papers published that cite these observations.
I think this would be a great return of results, both as someone who collects and identifies on iNaturalist and as a researcher. Plus, it seems to be a great way to allow for more transparency in attribution and credit for iNaturalist observers in general.
I love this idea! I know I stumble on some rare species sometimes, as well as lots of heavily-studied migratory species, so I’d love to see how that data is being used!
Just an update: this sounds pretty neat but we’re filing it under a “good to have at some point” for now since notifications, life lists, etc., have priority at the moment.
Due to hint from @dschigel I came across with BioNomia (https://bionomia.net/) website (former Bloodhound), which aims to link every specimen from herbaria and zoological museums (present in GBIF) with definite collector or identifier. As it was said before, the site uses ORCID or WikiData ID to identify a person, whereas a group of volunteers is crosslinking specimens and people profiles. The most striking feature of this site which could be implemented on iNaturalist is tracking of GBIF-citations on a single-specimen level. Every time when a stable GBIF-download with doi is cited, the system is tracking all specimen-based records from this download.
I was a bit surprised that the same proposal was already discussed on the forum last spring, so I’d like just to refresh the discussion. I believe the idea is really important for citizen science project.
The experience of BioNomia which currently manages ca. 160M GBIF-mediated specimen records shows that a simple counter of citations could be installed on every observation page with a link to a list of papers where it was cited. The similar counter with a citaion list could benefit basic stats on user’s profile.
Yeah, this post was based on my interactions with Bionomia. I’m currently working on a project to do something similar to what’s done with Bionomia with the “Human Observation” specimen records in GBIF, so including iNat but a bit broader. I’m starting with iNaturalist and eBird but with plans to expand. Its a bit slow going since its a side project instead of my primary gig, but I’m hoping to have a beta site by the end of the year
Even if it doesn’t show up automagically on my iNaturalist profile, I would love to have a way to know if, and how, my iNat Observations are contributing to scientific research. I could always add an explicit link to my ORCID profile.
I’ve got my ORCID linked on iNaturalist. I don’t know how that shows up in GBIF or GloBI.
I’ve confirmed that my my ORCID shows up in data exports from iNaturalist. And datasets downloaded from GBIF also include an Observer ORCID field. (I don’t recall right now what it’s called.)
GloBI interactions also include the Observer ORCID exported from iNat.