I agree. However, if the alternative is students being encouraged/required to ID as part of their assignments (to offset the low ID/observation ratio), I will take the lack of identifications!
For me, I’d prefer “lower quality” observations to lower quality identifications. A lower quality ID is much harder/requires more effort to deal with (often requires 3 IDs) than a lower quality observation (which may need just one interaction with an IDer to deal with effectively).
Frankly, I’d be happy if the students simply ID their own observations as Plants/Animals/Fungi rather than leaving them as Unknown. I don’t think it’s too much to ask of high school and college students to understand the differences among those three taxonomic groups (I’ll let them slide on slime molds and the algal groups) and to apply that knowledge to their observations.
weren’t you organizing an identification blitz? maybe you could have your blitz focus on those bluer areas, or maybe seek out folks from those bluer areas to help during the blitz? or maybe since school observations tend to be very repetitive, those might actually be a good place for new identifiers to learn some common plants?
to be honest i don’t think classes should ever assign iNaturalist. It should be presented to students (when they are of an appropriate age) as a potential learning tool and teachers can offer to help with IDs. Also I think an event like a bioblitz is great as long as it’s voluntary. But to be honest, i’ve been on iNat since 2011 and for the entire time students have ever been assigned to use it, the results have been awful. This spans just about any culture that is represented on iNat as well. It’s an odd aspect of human psychology because if someone assigned iNat decides they like it and change to doing it by choice you can see when their observations get better - it has nothing to do with age. But if the site is assigned to students, they will produce awful data as a whole and not contribute to the community. The best approach would be to have student accounts and only give students a regular account when the class is done and they are only using it by choice. But, i don’t think the iNat devs are going to do that, so my recommendation is just don’t use iNat that way, it doesn’t benefit the students, the teachers, OR the community here.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but hey i guess i’ve got a lot of those.
I am indeed organizing a plant blitz for late February, but it’s region-wide, so I think it’ll be hard to ask IDers to concentrate just on the bluer areas. In truth, I think what helps the most is to emphasize that using the As Good As Can Be designation can help clear out a good many Needs ID observations. Before the blitz, I’ll be trying to move as many plant Unknowns as possible into whatever finer categories I can, and then I’ll point people to Dicots, Monocots, Ferns, Vascular plants, and so on. (Not just the observations I pulled out of Unknowns, mind you, because lots of IDers have helped with that task.)
You know, I think you have a good point there. I know that many hardcore iNat users try their best to educate the teachers who use iNat or participate in the CNC how best to use the site, but I don’t see much improvement over time, to be honest, and I’ve been doing CNCs for 5 or 6 years now.
My evil twin says to give Unknown observations a month from submission for the observers to have a chance to suggest an ID, then add a comment reminding them to add an ID, then wait another month for the observer to respond, and then mark it Casual in some way that the iNat staff won’t like but will remove it from the Needs ID piles. Unfortunately, my evil twin rarely gets to come out and play.
This reminds me of your other topic, well worth looking at, for anyone who hasn’t seen it:
There’s also the problem of students misunderstanding what IDing means. I’ve come across several observations where students include their student IDs, driver’s licenses, etc. in the observation!
These cases are not due to conflating the two meanings of ID, but rather typically a result of instructors telling their students they need to include something in the image to prove they took the photo and didn’t rip it off the internet
I think the effect of students on iNaturalist depends on the students and on the teacher. I’ve assigned iNaturalist posting to college botany classes and I’ve seen other professors do the same. Students were required to ID their posts, too, for the grade. I think the results would have been positive for iNaturalist even if I hadn’t checked each one (which I did). At least some other profs do this, too.
Those middle school classes where students go out in groups and post six photos of the same cultivated shrub, providing no ID or a stupid ID, are a different thing. The ones where students pool their ignorance to ID each other’s observations are the worst.
A higher percentage of the population in the Global South have just other problems in daily life than to care for nature compared to the Global north and its Western culture. But in absolute numbers of course the population of potential members of iNaturalist.org the first group of human beings outnumbers the last group by far. My conclusion? The Global South is not very interested in nature, although its loss affects it more than the Global North.
I think there are lots of reasons why iNat is not used with equal intensity everywhere in the world. I doubt it means that people in the Global South do not care about nature.
Being interested in nature for nature’s sake (rather than its relevance for humans) is in many ways a luxury. I imagine it is a luxury that is easier to indulge in if one is reasonably financially secure and has time to spend on leisure activities. The concept of leisure and recreation and the high value that is placed on it in Western countries is also not universal.
The attitude towards nature that is the basis for the idea of the “naturalist” in the first place is likewise culturally specific. People from non-Western cultures may be interested in nature but not choose to engage with it in the form of posting observations on the internet rather than – for example – sharing experiences within their local communities.
Participation on iNat also requires access to, at a minimum, electricity, internet/cell phone data, and some kind of photographic technology. If the availability of these resources is limited, one might prioritize other internet activities.
iNat also doesn’t and can’t have any direct or immediate impact on the destruction of ecosystems or loss of biodiversity, so engagement or lack of engagement with iNat says very little about how much people care about environmental problems, or whether they are doing anything to mitigate them.
We are. Actually. But investment goes to the global North.
Europe’s per-capita solar powerhouse
Netherlands has 2 solar panels per inhabitant. But the global South has more sun. Too expensive to invest here, they say.
And a PS
Welcome to the Great Southern Bioblitz - and following tiwane’s comment below - ignore Australia and NZ basically
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2024-umbrella
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2023-umbrella
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2022-umbrella
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2021-umbrella
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2020-umbrella
I’m not sure how others are intepreting “global south” but I imagine @petzenbeer is using this definition? I just want to make sure everyone’s on the same page, because when I first heard the term I thought it was referencing the southern hemisphere, which is not the case.
I would have to say that my biggest culture shock when I began traveling was connected to this. Before I traveled, my knowledge of tropical rainforests came from books filled with colorful, pretty pictures. To me, it looked like the Garden of Eden.
Then I found out about the reasons for tropical deforestation, and that didn’t fit. How could such a lush, seemingly Edenic place be so hard to live in that people felt they had to destroy it to survive?
Years ago, while working in the neotropical rainforest we had an in-country helper on our expedition to collect. One day that person asked me “what will you do once you leave this green hell?” So, part of the answer is that for many it is not perceived as heaven, but as hell…literally.
Oh wow, why is it seen that way?
I know from working in the boreal forest that it often looks like paradise but feels like hell without good preparation (other than a couple months in the spring and fall, you need to completely cover up to prevent exposure to either freezing or bugs), but my experience in tropical countries hasn’t been that bad. Although I guess the background disease risk is a lot worse.
In my experience, snakes, mostly. They will cut a swath of forest around their house and keep the grass and weeds cut as much as they can to keep snakes from wandering into their houses. And if that works to keep snakes away a little, it’ll work a little more and a little more around their house. Add to that clearing for grazing, etc, etc, etc, but on an individual family level living at river’s edge…snakes.
In addition to the reasons you’ve listed, it’s also possible for someone to be out observing nature, taking photos, and uploading those photos online to a site other that iNaturalist.
Here in South Korea – granted, not a member of the Global South – we have websites/apps both for plant identification (모야모) and general nature identification (네이처링), with the latter used as a resource in publications by local researchers and which also includes projects tracking things such as grasshopper abundance and dead birds (among many, many others), and features identifiers from among academics, nature & forestry guides, and everyday citizens within Korea.
Based on observations posted to iNaturalist, you’d think that people in Korea don’t really care about recording fish. However, based on observations posted to 네이처링, you’d think that fish are one of the more popular things for people in Korea to record. The country and platform make a difference, which is worth remembering when making claims about citizens in some countries ‘not being very interested in nature’ because they aren’t using a website/app from the USA.
that also explains why a lot of iNat obs are - dead snake - what is it?