Great app. We’re looking at developing an app to facilitate community tree nurseries focused on native tree production and this is the ideal front end for the project, however we need a quite detailed back end and user focused app for the nursery management piece. Is there a simply way by which users in a private project on inaturalist could synch with another app and export all their observations and user details, synching for updates as they progress in their explorations? Thx.
Welcome to the forum!
This doesn’t sound like a good fit for iNat as it focuses on cultivated organisms which are tolerated on iNat but not encouraged. iNat also doesn’t have “private” projects per se (though there are some restrictions for inclusion that could make a project somewhat “private”.
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i’m having a hard time understanding how a nursery management system would integrate with a system like iNaturalist. can you describe in a little more detail how you envision the systems would work together? are you thinking of using iNaturalist as a source for folks to go out and collect seeds and that sort of thing?
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This seems like a very poor fit and use for iNat.
iNat is mainly about documenting organisms in the wild and is not a product management/inventory tool.
What it sounds like you need is some sort of dedicated inventory management tool rather than trying to shoehorn iNat into that role.
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Hi everyone,
We are keen to encourage volunteers to document organisms in the wild and thus geo-locate native trees. The plan is that under a license from the National Parks and Wildlife Service in Ireland, and with written permission from the landowners, the project would engage in sustainable seed collection from around healthy trees each autumn. This would include random sampling from small batches of collected seed to ensure that the source trees are certified as fully native species. It appears that hybridization is a challenge with some species and that this needs to be checked.
@pisum you are spot on. Our hope is that the data collected on iNat could help volunteers ‘stock’ the community tree nursery (local non-profit) with suitable seeds, allow for stratification as required and enable the seeds to germinate effectively. The germinated seeds would then be planted out either on raised beds or into pots to allow them grow on for between 2 and 5 years. They would then be distributed for free and/or sold to landowners, farmers, foresters, local authorities and agencies, horticulturalists and other interested parties. This can offer an income stream to the community tree nursery (see UK for models) to sustain it.
Private was a poor choice of phrase. Dedicated would be a better option. One of our ideas is that we would get local schools involved (with whom we already work on sustainability), so we wanted a means to tie this to the project.
@earthknight iNat would help identify the source trees only. We may have to build an app to do the rest, if we are to successfully scale this beyond the initial pilot.
If anyone is interested in the idea of a community tree nursery, there are excellent resources available from the UK, including reports on how and why they have succeeded and/or failed.
Thanks for your interest, happy to follow up with any further queries.
BTW, it appears that you can use an API to download data once you research certain standards as a member. Fantastic app. Delighted to have it and this community.
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just a few thoughts:
- make sure your volunteers have proper collection permits / permission, as needed. in my mind, you would probably want to be able to track permits and tie those to individual observations. iNat doesn’t really offer a good way to do the former, but it could do the latter.
- iNat is an open platform, and folks sometimes go to locations in the platform to look for things that have been posted. not all landowners / neighbors appreciate the potential for drawing outsiders to particular locations.
- iNat has a function in the system that obscures locations, however, it’s technically still possible to find the underlying location of any obscured observation in the system. so it’s not perfect protection.
- traditional projects offer one way for folks to collect specific observations and require those observations to include specific “observation fields”, which you can use to capture some information that may be information to you. projects also have the ability to confer project curators the ability to see the underlying coordinates of obscured observations
- i assume that you would want to use iNat to both identify candidates for collection and for documenting the collection. this could be structured using two different projects. alternatively, you could use a single project and then maybe use observation fields to differentiate between leads and collections. each approach has pros and cons. so just spend some time thinking about which is best for you.
- as you noted, the API does offer a way to get data from the system. i’m not sure how large your operation will grow, but just be aware that the API is not really ideal for getting more than 10,000 observation detail records. it is also possible to write information back to the system, although you generally need to do that one observation at a time. so look at the API limits, and make sure you won’t run into problems there.
- the current version of the API is v1, but v2 is already rolling out to many parts of the platform even though it is still technically considered in beta.
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I’m incredibly interested in this concept and have been working on something in isolation for a few years now. If you’re on discord or something similar I’d love to have a voice chat about it. This has the potential to be soooo meaningful to individual restorationists who have put their hearts and souls into restoring their land, watched native colonies expand to the point of no longer being able to expand further, and have no way to collect seeds from these colonies to share with a network of restorationists in their same geographic region (in my case I’ve focused on private land only… where the owner does their own collection). If you asked me to fly to the UK so that we could meet and talk about the concept I probably would. It’s been soooo hard finding others interested enough to participate in a conversation about it.
btw… it’s fairly easy to store the observation id of the parent tree as an observation field on observations of child trees (assuming you pass the parent observation along to recipients of propagated trees via a qrcode on a pot or something similar). this would allow the donor to see all the locations where trees were planted from that parent by recipients. you can see the geographic spread of children of each tree collected from.
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You mentioned avoiding hybridized seeds. Just keep in mind that the initial identification for most of the observations would likely be done by the ai. As I understand, it’s based on pattern recognition and can only be as good as the pictures provided. After that, it’s like a community vote on what the organism actually is. Ideally, this would be used to narrow the field so that it can get a better identification from experts. I have seen numerous posts about this not working out very well. For example, if someone thinks it would be funny to identify a tree as a chicken, and they get their friends to do the same, then you have a research grade observation of a tree identified as a chicken.
My point is, you’ll need to confirm every individual before using the seed.
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The api’s (I believe) allow you to search for an ID made by a particular user that is known to the organization (the user ID of the ID’ers is returned by the APIs). So if their organization has an expert willing to visit the trees collected from, their app could only display the trees with a corroborating ID by their expert. They’d also be inviting the oversight of the millions of experts existing here some of whom might enjoy following a project that is disseminating native seeds to restore that particular region.
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Maybe, maybe not. Experienced observers often have or acquire a solid working knowledge of the species in their area and they may well ID their observations using something other than the AI suggestions.
It is pretty uncommon for schoolkids to identify observations by people other than their friends; if the organization plans to foster tree surveying by community members in a structured manner, this is a very different situation than kids who are set loose with the app with very little instruction or guidance – i.e., if it is organized well, I see no reason to assume that the observations would be plagued by the same problems as those of duress and competition users.
The vast majority of IDs provided by users are made in good faith with at least some basic knowledge about what they are IDing. This is not automatically the same as being correct, but wildly misguided IDs, while they do happen (I experienced this myself the other day), are the exception rather than the rule.
This is not to say that the organization shouldn’t make sure they verify the IDs of any trees they wish to collect seed from, but this is just good practice and would be the case even if iNat used a less democratic system for ID verification.
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I didn’t mean to imply that poor ID’s were abundant, or that IDers were largely incompetent. I only wanted to point out that it isn’t 100% accurate. It could be a great way to help locate desired plants, but they will need to be double checked.
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As noted above, though, iNat really isn’t a good spot for projects that are designed to lead to a large number of observations of cultivated organisms. But that doesn’t seem to be OP’s intent after their post above which added more info.
This project would seem to be a better fit for iNat than the initial post lead me to believe, though still a few potential wrinkles to work out (as usual).
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I’ve come to share your concern about too many observations of cultivated organisms more than I did when I first joined iNat and the forum.
I have a very rudimentary working prototype of an app that pairs with an iNat project illustrating the seed library concept. I’ve worked on this by myself and a handful of friends who have been willing to indulge me. We’ve hardly shared any seeds at all. It’s been more about exploring how the concept might be supported by iNat and other technologies.
Would it be ok if I shared the prototype here? Or would you rather me share it privately with westerly1965 if asked? There are three basic pieces to it (an iNat project for the property(s) collected from, a simplistic accompanying app that lists the species available in the library, and a discord server that runs SeedWasp where the real-world network can chat privately about the species shared and be assigned roles like (collector, propagator, seed librarian, etc)).
Anyway, I’ve put a lot of thought into it and I’m ready for it to be shot down if necessary. If it’s propped up instead, I’m willing to allow it.
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I’d probably start out with a DM to ask if the user would be interested in it.
If you want broader feedback from the community, you could make a new thread for the setup specifically asking for feedback, improvement, etc. but probably best to leave this thread focused on the OP’s original request. If you do make a new thread, you could add a link to this thread in your initial post to clarify this is where the convo came from.
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Hi
The plan is to use DNA profiling for each batch of tree seeds (random sampling from small batches) and where possible to use isolated trees where hybridisation or seed fall from other trees is not an issue or where the risk is minimised. We’re not allowed by law to take any material from a living tree (and there’s a total ban on sapling removal, even if the deer get to them before we do).
All thoughts on this are very welcome.
Kieran
There are 314 observations in the UK that store an observation field of type “DNA”.
If your intent is to leverage the vast community on iNat for oversight, you may want to store the DNA coding as an observation field even if it’s mirrored publicly on your own site. This would allow the experts here to see that data without using an outlink.
https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observations.html?ofv_datatype=dna&place_id=6857
Hi Stockslager
Not sure about storing this publicly. We have to uphold data rights given the material is often on private owners land. Probably be a field within our own app/database application.
Thanks
Kieran
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