Yes, it’s hard to recruit people to join iNaturalist. Yes, it’s especially hard to recruit identifiers. But don’t give up. Only a small proportion of people you encourage to join iNaturalist will become active participants, but the ones who are can make a great difference! The person who introduced me to iNaturalist (after several tries), has encouraged many people to use the platform, including his students. Results have varied. One person he introduced to iNaturalist was @apseregin, who does many, many identifications and built up a whole network of Russian botanists, thus multiplying his results enormously! You just have to find the person or people with the right personality, interests, and internet connection. In a different context, we might say, “You gotta kiss a lotta frogs.”
Good comment. I think the key to recruiting someone who will be more than just a casual user, if even that, is to show them the functionality of the site that helps them do what interests them. I was skeptical that the site was little more than a glorified Facebook project until I saw that it could be useful to me as a resource for distribution data and an identification guide for taxa I was less familiar with.
Edit: iNat records are also a great way to keep track of your organism photos by date and location, so you can more easily find the originals in your stored files, if you organize as I do (by date).
While I can’t speak to Botswana I know for a fact this is true in Tanzania.
My feeling is that until the digital infrastructure improves, you won’t see much movement in participation numbers from countries where accessible internet is limited to work and maybe school.
Personally I know many more happy identifiers on iNaturalist, than unhappy ones. For me, a lot of that centers around managing expectations and being mindful of motivations.
The happy ones are here, identifying.
But the burnt out ones leave a gap.
I am happy making lots of identifications, but I do need to manage my expectations that I will, say, finish all the Unknowns (ha!) worldwide. Or even just to learn more about the flora where I live, so I could distinguish among all the cinquefoils. But I need to manage my expectations in the rest of my life as well (we shall not speak of the unfinished sweaters and quilts in my closets), so this has nothing to do with iNat and everything to do with me.
There seems to be a misconception in some of the comments in this post that tropical countries lack identifiers.
Looking at a sample of countries in Africa it appears that there are about 2 identifiers for every observer !
Africa is lacking observers, and I dont think Africa is producing enough observations to keep the identifiers happy !
I have calculated the ratio of observers to identifiers.
My use of stats is very poor and suspect, but do suggest that the tropics are lacking observers more than identifiers. This contrasts with USA where there are nearly 8 observers for each identifier.
You’re giving me an great excuse to travel to the tropics sometime soon, just to make lots of observations!
Wow, fascinating data! Many thanks!!
We really do need you here in Africa focusing you camera lens on the small things like lichens, moths, bugs, mozzies, millipedes and fungi. Perhaps we have plenty of lion and elephant observations but Africa really does lack observations of the less exciting and minute things ! Come to Botswana with only a macrolens and keep your telephoto lens at home ! Africa needs you !
I like that iNat is growing, but it’s already growing and I don’t want to grow it so fast that the servers crash
I also question the degree to which the interesting tropical biodiversity is in cities, millions of observations of the tropical equivalent of a city pigeon is probably not what OP was intending
Regarding IDs, I know with insects some of the top identifiers do IDs globally, I’ve started IDing Central American paper wasps, even though where I live is so not tropical that I have snow on the ground right now, and I know many of the American ant identifiers that ID tropical ants all over the world, so I think getting IDs in the tropics is probably easier than observations
EDIT: please don’t ID things you are unfamiliar with just to ID tropical species, there have been many tens of thousands of false RG obs caused by identifiers blindly agreeing with observers on continents where the IDer did not know the fauna
Regarding your table, I think I contribute one identifier to almost every country listed. Hard to avoid that in getting iNat stats.
Most important for planning a trip … How’s the food?
You care about the food when there are life bugs to be found???
;-)
You can eat the bugs … https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/119995-Gonimbrasia-belina
(Not me, I’m vegetarian)
I spent 3 weeks in Kenya last winter and made observations of a wide variety of taxa, it’s been interesting to see what gets identified and what doesn’t. I haven’t uploaded most of my megafauna obs yet but the few I have were ID’d quickly. Tropical fish were relatively fast. Insects were faster than I expected but nearly none of my moths. Plants have largely not been touched, which surprises me. Fungi and lichens haven’t either, but the same is true for them at home in Ontario so that’s to be expected. As others have said I expect many of the ID’s are coming from global identifiers with niche interests (e.g. a wasp or beetle or ant identifier who’s learned some African genera).
The internet quality where I stayed in Kenya was slow enough that it was extremely demotivating for uploading to iNat while I was there. Some folks there were already using iNat a little bit, but it’s hard to argue for adding more tedious computer time to your life.
We need to ‘keep the old’ and pass the torch to the next generation.
We need all the iNatters we have, and then some for the future.
Do your pictures show flowers, or fruit? Then you have a chance.
Otherwise Unknown in Africa is my longest ID queue. (That is without South Africa, for ‘that country called Africa’)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?per_page=8&iconic_taxa=unknown%2CPlantae&order_by=observed_on&user_id=upupa-epops&place_id=7042 125 obs. I will try
But you do prove my point. Left in honest Unknowns people will look at them. The broad planty IDs languish in limbo. 10 months and counting …
I would not be for “explosive” growth (which I would define as rapid growth of contributing users and of their content) and don’t think anyone on the iNat team is for it either. I can’t think of any social networks where explosive growth’s benefits didn’t outweigh its downsides unless you’re counting profit as a benefit, and iNat is not interested in profits (we’re a nonprofit org) but in building a strong community that helps people interact with nature and generates usable data. I also suspect iNat would not experience sustained rapid growth unless new observers’ observations are being identified, so the two kind of go hand-in-hand.
I’m definitely for growth if it’s sustainable, and especially among areas, communities, and taxa that are currently underrepresentated on iNat. That usually happens when communities are formed on or brought to iNat, either geographically or taxonomically or both. Usually one person or a few people do workshops, add IDs, provide resources, and build the community until it kind of has enough momentum and synergy to maintain itself on its own. It takes a lot of work and doesn’t happen overnight.
A very non-exhaustive list of some examples:
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mutolisp’s talk about how he and others built the Taiwan community on iNaturalist.
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groups of people making resources available for fly identification in North America or gall identification in North America and are also contiually engaged with observers of those observations.
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experts like jurga_li and amila_sumanapala spending time to make IDs and helpful comments to assist people as they grow as naturalists.
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Mexico and its system of tutors in every state who provide training and workshops.
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people like sambiology, cullen, and the late Greg Lasley helped turn Texas into an early iNat powerhouse by adding IDs and comments, and doing local outreach.
Yeah, I think it’s important to remember that none of us have to carry the weight of the entire site/community on our backs (and it’s also not really possible for anyone to do that).
As a user who currently stands at 831 observations and 51,125 IDs – a 1:61.5 ratio – I join you in that sentiment. As you pointed out, 50% of identifications are made by 545 users, and I am not one of the top 500. What if even 20% of users met Diana’s ratio of observations to identifications? 1:2.5 is not exactly a power identifier, but if more users did it, we would have less need for power identifiers.
433 of my 831 observations – 52% – are from before I joined iNaturalist.
So far Africa, especially in the tropics is very far from explosive growth which is going to overload the iNat servers and wear out identifiers.
See the iNat performance of different African countries here.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/biodiversity-of-africa
Most of Africa is still taking its iNat baby steps.