Hi all -
I am in charge of keeping track of the biodiversity data within the watershed the nonprofit I am involved with protects. We have been really lacking in aquatic species data in our iNaturalist project and recently we were given a copy of the report for a watershed-wide fish and macroinvertebrate study by those that were involved with the research 25 years ago. I found this question in here from 2020 on the forum:
Does a historic species list have reference value? - General - iNaturalist Community Forum
and while it answered a lot of my questions, I am still stumped on how to account for the unknown dates of their sampling. I have pretty specific location data for sampling sites, but no dates other than year. I plan to upload everything as casual grade, and credit the authors/researchers in the comments of all the observations.
Thoughts?
I’m not clear on what type of sampling data you’re refering to. Is the sampling data represented by photographs of fauna/flora? I’m afraid if you don’t have any better detail than the year of surveys, then that data is probably inappropriate and incompatible with the type of information recorded on iNaturalist. As you already understand, 2nd-hand or 3rd-hand data is not the primary focus of iNat as a repository. I hate to be a nay-sayer, but perhaps there is a different website/venue/database where this information could reside.
The sampling data is from electrofishing, etc. and does not have photographs (hence casual grade). They have comprehensive results with lists of species gathered at each sampling location (which I have precise info for).
This is what I was afraid of though, not being able to include this data. It’s already frustrating enough not having all our data in one place (I have to keep a separate eBird account for all our avian data because we only have a fraction of the birds in our project), so I was hoping to not have this data just sitting on the side somewhere as well!
I will read over the report again because I skimmed the methods section. Maybe they had something in there with at least the months they went out and I accidentally missed it. If they do have months, is a standard date of the 1st sufficient, with a note about slight inaccuracy of date? It seemed like others in the forum discussion that I linked were okay with that?
Thanks for your input!
If you or someone associated with the project/non-profit has computer skills, you might consider building a simple, dedicated website as a focal repository for all types of data.
I would look into whether this data could be submitted directly to GBIF if it’s not there already, that’s probably a more suitable platform for this sort of thing
This is all was able to find, so I think I answered my question and probably won’t be able to enter this data:
“Each study site will be visited at least twice for a complete assessment. The first site
visit will take place in the winter/spring and will involve obtaining landowner permission,
determination of the 100 meter section to be sampled, macroinvertebrate sampling, and habitat.
The second stage will involve collection of the fish community and will take place in the late
spring and summer (likely into autumn). Observations for mussels, reptiles, and amphibians
will be made during both site visits.”
Creating a single dedicated database is unfortunately not likely to happen, no matter how badly I wish I could! We are 100% volunteer organization and what I’m doing now is already a lot of work outside a full-time job! Maybe one day if we hire official employees!
Since they’re all going to be “casual” observations anyway due to lack of photos, do they need a date? I often see observations made by new users marked as casual for the reason of “missing date.”
It’s possible uploading too many without dates would be frowned upon (I’m not sure) but there’s a difference between “not allowed at all” and merely “can’t become research grade.”
Your organizations fish and bird data might be better suited for GBIF.
GBIF has some electrofishing datasets. https://www.gbif.org/dataset/search?q=electrofishing
Here’s info about how organizations can join GBIF and upload data. https://www.gbif.org/publishing-data
This doesn’t sound like a good fit for iNat. In addition to the data not really fitting iNat’s data structure well, iNat’s not a repository for data generated elsewhere.
This is outside your iNaturalist question, but 25 years is not as long as you think. I would try to track down the original researchers and ask them about their original data sheets from that study. This may still be inappropriate for iNaturalist, but might be valuable for your nonprofit.
Thank you so much for your input. This is exactly why I came to the forum to get answers before I took the time to do this!