I just wanted to give a quick update on functionality changes to better use location in CV suggestions.
On iNaturalist, we currently use location data to boost visually similar species that are also seen nearby, but we don’t do anything to demote visually similar species that aren’t seen nearby
Ken-ichi gives a good overview of this in this talk he recently gave to TDWG:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfbabznYFV0
We’ve learned from model evaluation experiments that demoting visually similar species provides better predictions on average than our current approach of not doing that. But we’ve held off because we want iNaturalist to also work well in situations where location data might not help, such as a garden filled with ornamentals or a remote location without much nearby data to draw from.
We’re currently working on altering the CV suggestions on iNaturalist so that by default it will demote visually similar species that aren’t seen nearby. But there will be a new toggle to have the CV ignore location data to accommodate these situations where location data doesn’t help (e.g. gardens, captivity).
We’re rolling this out in Android first as part of a new more elaborate ‘species chooser’ which we’re currently testing internally and hope to have in beta some time in the next month. Why Android? That’s just where we have the development resources right now. Once we’ve figured out how to make it work there, we’ll move on to changing the default/adding the toggle on the website and getting it on to the iOS app in some form.
On Seek, we currently don’t incorporate location data into the CV suggestions because Seek suggestions work offline and doing so requires getting location data on-device (there are a few exceptions related to the camera roll and older versions of iOS which use ‘online’ CV and thus location from the server). We’ve recently made progress on getting location data incorporated into the offline Seek CV suggestions (we have a working Android version) but we don’t yet have a release date. When this update is released, Seek will work in the same way as our plan for iNaturalist: i.e. demote species not seen nearby by default and have an option to ignore location data.
Thanks for bearing with us and your patience. We hope these features will help towards reducing the number of wrong IDs suggested by the CV and will thus help alleviate identifier burnout.