These seem to me to be tied together. We already have educators using iNaturalist (not always using it well, but that’s an issue that is being dealt with on an ongoing basis). Can the same idea be promoted in the cities listed?
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Growth in usage and observations also means corresponding (though usually not linear) growth in technical infrastructure (think compute power, redundant systems, database management, engineering staff, operations staff, etc).
I’d love to see iNat grow like crazy, but as others have commented, in a sustainable way. Adding staff and technical capabilities is not easy or a flip of the switch.
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before pushing to recruit observers, and besides recruiting identifiers, it might be important to also recruit translators, curators of all stripes, and other folks to share the burden of various types of administrivia, where they aren’t already present in a few of these areas.
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What’s internet access like for the regular folk in these locales? My experience is that the internet is still not readily accessible via personal devices or even in homes in a lot of places.
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I live in Central Botswana and am the main organiser in Botswana for the City Nature Challenge and Great Southern Bioblitz. Botswana is a large, low population country of less than 3 million people. I have struggled and struggled to try to get more local observers in Botswana for the last 4 years, by using emails and social media and visitung government officials. It’s so tough to get people interested and despite so much of my time dedicated to trying to market iNaturalist here, I have completely failed. I reckon, over 95% of observers in Botswana are tourists and temporary visitors. The high cost of internet, relative to incomes may be a major factor. What interests me is the total lack of interest in iNaturalist and Citizen Science generally by our museums, schools, boy scouts and girl guides, university Biology, Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture,Environmental Studies departments, conservation organisations Wildlife Dept. If I was able to find one champion for iNaturalist from one of these organisations, I would die a happy, old man. The challenge in Botswana is to find just 10 new regular and committed observers ! There is certainly no danger at all in Botswana flooding iNaturalist with too many observations ! I think the problem we have in Botswanak is that too many of our observations of small, tiny insects like moths, leafhoppers and beetles are just unidentifiable because they may be new species. Surely that problem increases when we go up to the warmer (without a cold winter) and wetter parts of Africa, We should not expect too many of observations of small things to be identified.Let’s at least try to get more pictures of the minute lifeforms and have low expectations that they shall ever be identified on iNat…
My wish is that the top leadership of iNaturalist bombards the Govt Ministers and Permanent Secretaries of Africa with information about the benefits of promoting iNaturalist in their countries. I wonder how many African counries dont even have a Govt policy about promoting Citizen Science. These Ministries should be targeted. Ministries responsible for educaton at all levels, agriculture, science, forestry, fisheries, natural history museums, wildlife, game parks and conservation.
INaturalist is failing to get moving in Botswana because not a single teacher, government scientist or biologist, agriculturist, park ranger etc is using and promoting it. INaturalist plods along here because of a few retirees, like me and visiting tourists.
Africa needs a top-down promotion of iNaturalist !
South Africa has done extremely well in getting iNat moving because of the amazing work of a government organisation, South African National Biodiversity Institute SANBI as the main catalyst.
Without SANBI where would S Africa be on the iNat observation map ?
Zimbabwe and Zambia are starting to take off because their Natural History Museum managers have taken a lead and have become their key iNaturalist champions.
If Botswana, with a population of about 2,7 million can only produce perhaps 10 regular, committed and addicted iNaturalists, then what should we expect of other areas in the tropics which may be economically less endowed, without diamond wealth.
Please iNat leaders in USA, flood the key, Government Ministers of Africa with information about iNaturalist and its benefits for the education of their staff and students.
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How very frustrating for you!
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A person must have a very unique set of personality traits to become an avid user of iNaturalist. And even then, it often takes a good bit of convincing from friends and colleagues that are using it. It’s not just Botswana. It took a friend over a year of constant “nagging” to get me to try it, and another year before I became addicted.
In addition to the unique personality traits (a collector personality, for example), one must have a lot of free time. The vast majority of the people living in the cities listed simply aren’t going to have that combination. Even in the United States, if you compare iNaturalist use in different states, you see huge differences–with the deep south (the poorest region) being very low in active users relative to other states.
In my opinion, the most damaging thing we can do to iNaturalist is to promote the type of engagement that results in poor-quality observations (a photo that is blurry, not showing details allowing identification, wrong location, wrong dates, etc). If one had millions of dollars to do the promotion, I suspect we’d get mainly an increase in poor-quality observations.
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Frustrating though your experience has obviously been, the info above is amazing and incredibly valuable. I hope the INat leadership takes notice!!!
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In my experience, even trying to convince people is not productive in terms of high engagement users. I agree with all the cultural, social, and economic factors you mention as well, but setting those aside for a minute, my impression is most ‘power users’ tend to find the site on their own, or because friends/colleagues are using it but not because they were lobbied. I forget how i found it, i read about it somewhere on social media, maybe Kent McFarland or @earthknight. I then spent years trying to gte everyone i knew to use it because it was so great. I think I got a few people to use it, but that was just because they saw me using it, not because i pushed them to. At best pushing people to use iNat leads to short-term casual users who don’t get much out of the site and leave. At worst, it leads to a lot of bad data and hurt feelings. Things like classroom assignments are even worse. Those produce tons of ‘duress observations’ of low quality and nearly everyone leaves after being assigned the site which clearly means they aren’t having a positive experience. It’s kind of like people have to find it on their own.
Unfortunately I agree with others that the growth is already too rapid here and has resulted in a lot of problems with the site… but also unfortunately. funding sources in this field always seem to value only growth, not maintenance and improvement within a steady state. Even though many ecologists recognize the idea of exponential economic growth as absurd, our field is also saturated with that stuff.
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Families who don’t have data for ‘frivolous’ reasons like iNat. Sharing one cellphone among parents, and kids doing homework …
And when I was trying to catch up after skiving off for 4 weeks - we had an
ag
on
is
ingly
slow internet - that does NOT work for iNat 
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Reasonable points all. A couple of friendly responses:
-Inaturalist added something like 400,000 new users over 2023. Is it a bad idea to try to increase the number of users by more than that in 2024?
-The technical issues you mention are very real. The logical next step seems like it should be to fix the technical issues in order to accommodate more growth, not to limit growth in order to keep the technical problems under control.
-The rhetoric of exponential growth has been abused by business people. Environmentalists should reclaim it by promoting exponential growth in environmental consciousness, scientific research, and populations of endangered organisms.
-But as you say, growth isn’t everything. Data quality also matters.
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In my opinion? Probably. But i don’t think most people share that opinion and I accept that.
growth for growth’s sake could be damaging, even here. It’s like making a dam. You want to improve the dam height to fit more water, you don’t want water to overflow the dam first.
Well the thing with that is exponential growth makes no sense even in positive concepts. With true exponential growth you end up with more populations of endangered species than there is carbon in the solar system in a few centuries… one way or another exponential growth doesn’t last very long in a long term view.
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Here is the published research about identifiers on iNat
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Summaries-of-identification-effort-on-iNaturalist-Panels-a-and-b-summarize_fig1_372310054
I find those figures daunting.
99% of IDs by 40998 users
90% by 6141
75% by 2021
50% by 545
and 25% by 130 ! That is not sustainable. If one of those power users deletes their profile … it leaves devastation and a team with polyfilla papering over the cracks.
And identifiers are not happy
https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/joe_fish/74452-taxonomy-strike
21 Jan 2023 and comments are still rolling in a year later
(My name is Diana and I am an iNat ID junkie. This place is dangerous)
I blame @tonyrebelo 's posts on Facebook - his persistence moved South Africa from iSpot to iNat. And drove Cape Town’s first CNC.
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Good points all. Seems like getting more Identifiers on board is going to be INat’s main challenge in the coming years.
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Take a step back - I would like iNat to encourage all observers to ID about two and half times as many obs as they post.
2.5 IDs is a good average allowing for the interesting and difficult ones in the mix.
Encourage, because you obviously cannot require that.
And that means better onboarding with video clip tutorials.
The same sort of nannying we have here in the Forum. (Where it does not ‘matter’ if I have - too many likes today)
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This is a bit of a tangent, but I’ve been thinking about the IDing gap, had an idea, and am trying to figure out if it’s worth making it a feature request. Do you think it would help engage new people as IDers if the default display for the Identify page was all the unknown observations or something?
When I was starting, I found the “anything from anywhere” presentation of the ID page pretty overwhelming. Identifying is one of my big motivations for using iNat, so I was incentivized to figure out the filter system. But it still took a bit for me to find settings where I could add value to enough of the observations that it felt like a productive use of time. I could see how if someone didn’t have that motivation and just clicked over to see what it was, they might look at all of the (often species-level) anything from anywhere observations and just decide that they couldn’t help. Maybe if the first thing people saw were observations where they could go “that’s a bee”, “that’s a cat”, “pretty sure that’s a pine tree”, it would be easier to get them involved in identifying.
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This seems like a great idea to me.
Indeed, the slightly clunky, slightly intimidating quality of the app as a whole is one of the main impediments to its wider adoption by the public.
I think the RX is a $100,000,000 donation and an infusion of designers and engineers from the private sector who are disillusioned with the evils of working for Facebook and Uber.
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When I started posting some records to iNat ten years ago, there were fewer than 500,000 records total on the site. (I didn’t post all that many records and still don’t.) It was a rather quiet little website, kind of like that really good restaurant you like to visit that doesn’t have many customers … until it’s discovered by everyone else. Now the site is huge, with an overwhelming number of submissions daily and a backlog of unIDed records.
Personally I don’t think iNat needs more explosive growth. It’s already there. Granted, some places in the world might benefit from more active submitters/IDers, but that’s not something most of us can do anything about. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to focus on my little corner of the globe with an occasional submitted record and ID.
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I took about a year to find my way around iNat. And there are still hidden corners that catch me by surprise. We want informed confident IDs. Fungi is fine, but not a species which is wrong.
I would prefer, a popup after 100 or 200 or 500 obs. Some have thousands !! of obs but haven’t made any IDs for others. After thousands, they must have some knowledge to share on iNat.
This (video tutorial) - is how you pay it forward. Ideally with a mentor to answer questions. For me that has been threads on the Forum. And kind helpful comments from taxon specialists. Including - can’t take this ID further without …
Another option is around CNC or GSB. You have been there, seen that - now you can help to ID it.
I hike around the Cape Peninsula. I win both ways. I can ID what I have seen for myself, and I can look for what others have posted on iNat.
I started here - now I clear it each day. And I have a row of bookmarked URLs added one by one.
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Hi Diana and hi everyone,
[->what I think is the main (structural) problem leading to the big pool of unidentified observations: see last paragraph]
following the comments in the Forum (which I enjoy reading), I thought it might be interesting for you to know some background on my “pile of observations” and why the ratio of observations and identifications for others is how it is… I think a first step of trying to change the growing number of unidentified observations is to understand where they originated.
I am working on a better ratio of own observations to identified ones, but also have to admit that mine is now far from what you consider ideal (something like 1:0.5, I aim for 1:1 in the long run). There are a few things that can lead to similar ratios - people joining Inaturalist bring observations they made in the past (me and my brother started recording biodiversity in high school, but I joined Inaturalist much later; This effect might be stronger outside of the US, since it took a while for Inaturalist to become popular around the world) - But even after I joined, the ratio was not great - but as I mentioned I am working on changing that. Still, sometimes I think that having a lot of observations can also have some advantages - more observations of under-recorded species will eventually help the AI learn how to ID the species, and afterwards it might help people by giving them a hint where to look and/or who to tag - so it might improve the identifications a bit in the long run; Also, it has become a habit to try to observe at least some species in different stages and in different habitats and at different times of the year - which adds up to a relatively large number of observations, but these can be searched through by identifiers a bit easier. … (my 10 most observed species add up to more than 1000 observations and are easily identifiable) and I think that these observations provide nice additional information about the ecology for me and anyone else interested in it. Some people like to selectively record only species that are new to them, but sometimes I like to record everything of a particular taxon that I can find at a site…
Just for fun, I looked at what the ratios are for some of the people with the most observations in Germany and checked what their ratio of their observations to identifications was (total observations and identifications; numbers from the profiles); Four have a ratio of around 1:1, then there is one with a ratio of 5:1 and one with 4:1, I have an 0.5:1 ratio and there are 3 people with a 0:1 ratio.
The more you look into it, the more you see that there are a lot of different ways that people use Inaturalist, but also you will find different groups of users… (it should also be mentioned that more and more experts seem to join in Germany, that are interested in the data: they identify selected observations of specific groups, but often not engage otherwise).
I think it would make a lot of sense to design a survey for people on Inaturalist to find out about (amongst other things): -why they use the platform, -what they would like more of, - what their background is regarding species identification and why or why not they have already identified observations of other users. Understanding these (any maybe other) points better could serve as a basis to encourage for people to start with identifying.
->-> But sadly I think that part of the problem is a structural one beyond Inaturalist – in the last decades there has been a decreasing interest in training species identification (only a bit of a change in the last years). Now we have an increased interest in biodiversity, but a lack of knowledge- here Inaturealist just reflects what has been happening in the wider society (there are some studies that, i.e. in Germany the study by Schlumprecht (2016) on the “Erosion der Artenkenner”[Decline in Species Experts], English summary here: https://www.nul-online.de/magazin/archiv/erosion-der-artenkenner,QUlEPTUwMDc0NzYmTUlEPTgyMDMw.html). To develop species identification expertise is a process that takes time – and excursions and trainings, both offline and online are an important part of this process – maybe we should think about how Inaturalist can shape the process a bit more proactively?
P.S.: Generally I have to mention that I think it is great that this site brings together people with so many different backgrounds, age and regions and naturally this leads to everyone contributing in a different way… 
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