eBird is much better for birds anyway, since you can record number of individuals and use hotspots and shared checklists to avoid redundancy
1 Like
Yes, I’m still a bit sad about that. Trips had a lot of potential. I would have used it once there was a trip equivalent of observation fields (to enter trip weather, trip sampling method, etc). If it had taken off, we wouldn’t be here talking about how hard it is to find representative, consistent data in iNat.
I totally get why iNat pivoted away from this. It would have been more complicated, and I doubt we’d have the big vibrant iNat community we have now if the team had invested in trips instead.
There’s still a big hole in the internet waiting for a flexible tool like this. I’m hoping that someone will build it and connect into all the iNat goodness using the iNat API.
6 Likes
Welcome to the Forum by the way! I’m guilty of that - If I take a picture of a small flower fly, I probably won’t take another one that day. And if they are really common I may only take one shot per season. Part of it is my reason for taking an observation in the first place, which is mostly to record the presence of a taxa in a specific place. I do take a lot more photos of common birds in the winter to sort of establish their presence during that time. We have cold winters, and I want to make sure they are surviving.
3 Likes
Such a feature may help (a lot), at least as far as the identification is concerned:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ideas-for-a-revamped-explore-observations-search-page/8439/157
2 Likes
Underrepresentation of anything that requires a microscope. If iNat data reflected the true diversity of any ecosystem, microbes would overwhelm everything else.
Differential representation of moths that come to lights vs. moths that do not.
Differential representation of near-ground taxa vs. canopy-dwelling taxa.
Differential representation of diurnal vs. nocturnal animals.
Differential representation of nearshore vs. pelagic taxa. Oceans are not even a searchable place, as far as I can tell.
9 Likes
Some types of animals look lrare due to lack of observations on them.
Take the croaking gourami for example. They are found everywhere in my country and others nearby, but there’s almost no observations of them besides mine.
3 Likes
Thank you @aiman_azmi ! Why are there almost no observations of them? Are they hard to access? Hard to photograph? Is there some reason that people ignore them?
It’s a fiыh, so it’s hard to potograph, same with most common fish specieы, e.g. Ruffe has 146 observations while if you’re fishing you’re getting tons of them.
iNaturalist has lots of quirky biases. For example, Song Sparrow and Bewick’s Wren are both small brown birds, common in brushy areas around here. The wren move more often and faster. Although I’m equally happy to photo either one (maybe happier to photo the wren), I have posted 7 Bewick’s Wren observations and 42 Song Sparrows.
It’s probably best to analyze things that are the same or very similar.
1 Like
Interesting! Do you think you photograph wrens less often because their movement makes them harder?
Yes. I think it’s partly because they’re harder to photo and partly because they spend less time in any one place, especially in the open, so they’re harder to see in the first place.
1 Like
Had a thought now, that we should think about how people who do or don’t participate in adding observations on iNat affect biodiversity we see? How much data and of which kind is “hidden” by those who refuse to use the site (and maybe comparing to those who just didn’t know about it)?
2 Likes
So, a bias towards species found in areas with good Internet access, a bias against species in areas without?
4 Likes
Maybe which groups are theoretically (I have my thoughts, but no statistics) not that well represented not because they’re hard to capture/id, but because people who do that don’t like iNat? If groups are hard, then those people have good data on them to show.
And counterpart to it – which groups are too much presented (comparing to others) not because they’re easy to id, but because people who like them are easily drawn into iNat? Both no matter how many iders there are to those groups.
1 Like
I’m not entirely clear what you mean. Could you give us an example, please, of where this bias might operate, even if it is speculative?
e.g. some experts in groups don’t feel like participation in citizen science is for them and they either achieved most of the data in the world on particular group (especially if it’s from hard to get places) or get much more samples of this group than any of current users do because of their work flow and if they would participate their data could majorly add iNat database leading to actual representation of taxon on maps, etc.
3 Likes
I work at a zoo that also does research on how species use urban space (among other things). My supervisor used to upload hundreds of hundreds of camera trap photos before he stopped because he felt uploading what was most likely dozens of shots of the same individual deer / squirrel / robin was starting to impact iNat’s perception of local abundance of those species (they are abundant–but not to the level of several dozen deer appearing in the same place over a couple minutes, haha. It’s just the same deer photographed seconds apart!)
Edit: although, the whole idea of this topic does make me pensive. I understand the need to be aware of these biases… but as an individual, should I stop delighting in submitting photos of things I already know are well documented in my area? Is all data useful to some extent, or is it harming the overall picture if we flood in too many common species?
2 Likes
I have a pond in my backyard that so many beautiful, large, easily observable different species of dragonfly like to frequent.
But they. Will not. Stay. STILL. >:(
7 Likes
You should absolutely keep uploading observations of whatever interests you. My intention was not to influence what people upload, just to better understand the data that result.
At the park where I work we have volunteers who run a camera trapping network. I’ve told them no more than one picture of the same deer/turkey/squirrel from the same location in the same hour can go on iNaturalist. That eliminated about 95% of the photos they would have uploaded.
5 Likes
I personally limit myself on some organisms that are common for me. I could submit records of Greater Roadrunner almost every day – and, like many, I never get tired of seeing or photo’ing these birds – but they are well-represented from my area. So I’ve posted few records of them.
Live small rodents, shrews, and bats are probably under-represented on iNat. They are just really hard to photograph in a way they can be identified, even when captured, as are many mammals.
4 Likes