I have been searching in this forum for a category about ecology & biodiversity ethics. I work in this area, and I am also part of the Citizen Science Association workgroup on ethics. Among other themes, we are working at raising the profile of issues pertaining to wildlife and habitat observation ethics, field ethics, data ethics with focus on the protection of species and habitats at risk -either red-listed (see IUCN red list) or vulnerable to human disturbances in heavily human populated areas and in areas subject to heavy nature/wildlife tourism.
Being in the forefront of these issues is important: Many countries and organizations centered around the observation of wildlife are having the discussions as we speak. It would be good that as a community of Naturalists that we are too, share our knowledge and get active on these issues. A dedicated category, would show our community commitment, raise our own awareness, and inspire our own community to excel and lead by example.
I also think that a curator group focused on these questions and issues would a good idea. Again, many organizations are taking the steps to have ethics as part of their community operation. Thereās no reason why our iNat community would not join this worldwide effort.
Currently, is this not just a subset of the Nature Talk category? I have not surveyed the existing category but I would think looking at it to see how much ecology & biodiversity ethics is already discussed here would be a place to start.
I just checked and no, there is no explicit discussions in that Nature Talk category on biodiversity ethics specifically that I can find (to the exception of a herping etiquette question, which I was involved with).
Ethics appears at times but itās a more utilitarian and anthropocentric kind of ethics (data ethics, identification ethics, communication etiquette, etc.), and less than often about ecological & biodiversity focused ethics. Once in a while a mention is buried within a post, but nothing really pops out either when key-word searching, or when scanning the list, or digging further. The need for a category would be precisely to avoiding topic dilution, and raising its profile to the community.
I also made the suggestion to the iNaturalist support/staff. Weāll seeā¦
Itās a good idea! Thanks, Bob! Will do: I will migrate this thread there. I surely hope that there will be a level of interest! Itās important stuff that many other communities find important to address :-)
I can make a topic in Nature Talk if you need assistance doing that. At this point, unless @tiwane has a different take, that would be the appropriate place for a discussion about Biodiversity and Ecology Ethics that isnāt specific to the iNaturalist site itself. If the conversation becomes too complex people can always reply as linked topics or new ones can be created if the discussion strays. Your initial topic post can structure the discussion though and guide other users in the way you were hoping to facilitate the discussion. Iām pretty sure adding new topic categories isnāt the plan right now.
While there might not be enough ethics conversations to warrant their own section, I donāt see why we canāt create an Ethics tag to help link related conversations and make them easier to find.
Thanks, Mira for the reply. Yes, I think that would be a great topic to add: Biodiversity & Ecology Ethics is a good title. Here, I mean ethics in relation to biodiversity citizen science and iNaturalist activities. So, for instance, open vs. closed geotagging of State-specific vulnerable species would be a topic.
FYI, I am on the CSA (Citizen Science Association) Ethics Working group, and I focus on such issues. And where I work, part of our content is focused on wildlife ethics, so Iāll be able to cross-post and feed that topic here on iNaturalist.
Otherwise, I see that you asked @tiwane, so I am asking too :-) What do you think, Tony? Recommendation? Suggestion?
Ah! Of course itās easy to add a topic (sorry I confused ātopicā with something else)! Now, to help the community find ethics-related posts, can we at a minimum add a tag āEthicsā. I see now that other people have ethics as an interest, so having a tag could help all of us and at a low cost to evaluate public response/interest.
So I was able to add an āethicsā tag to this thread, and Iām pretty sure anyone creating a new topic can create any tag(s) they want. The tagging prompt says āsearch or createā¦ā
Have you made a new āBiodiversity & Ecology Ethicsā topic under Nature Talk yet? If / when you have, it would be good to put a link to it in this topic, to guide interested readers to it.
I know that this thread is more than four years old. Mainly, Iām replying to it because since then, this has been said:
Well, then where are we supposed to go?
The iNat forums ā including Nature Talk ā have become my main outlet now. For a long time, I tried to engage with my Facebook network, but they just didnāt have the capacity to discuss the things that matter most to me. I donāt want to get into too much tedious detail, but after a while, my family and friends started to think that I was depressed. Maybe I was, from the inability to communicate.
Let me tell you, advising someone to see a therapist or counselor ā no matter how well-meant ā can feel more like āGo find someone whoās being paid to listen to you.ā
This requested category, and environmental issues in general, is just what I wasnāt able to discuss with my family and friends on Facebook. Iāve tapered off Facebook and become active on these forums for that exact reason. If this category, and the Nature Talk forum, were deprecated, I would have to start over again.
To my knowledge there is no discussion about eliminating the Nature Talk category.
As I understand it, the only thing ādeprecatedā about it was the decision to not include the category on peoplesā iNat dashboard feeds. I think the idea there is that they donāt want Nature Talk to be peoples āfirst entryā into the Forum, since the Forumās primary purpose is indeed to discuss various aspects of using iNaturalist. But otherwise the category is alive and well and easily discovered and used once someone is already on the Forum.
The only reason I could imagine Nature Talk ever being eliminated is if it became an unmanageable moderation burden, and/or diverged too far from the iNat sphere of topics. And that of course is in the hands of its participants.