Going to start this with a question….is there an ongoing effort to help bioblitz organizers both achieve their goals while not resulting in a landslide of observations to iNat that are (1) evidence of people trying to get a top spot for most observations (2) lacking in basic info and/or (3) burdenso…

I wish these events had different metrics by which they were assessed (if they must be competitive). If the goal is really to have people connect with and learn about nature, why not have “judges” of some sort who look for interesting or exceptionally detailed observations. For example, someone who …

[image] asteroidowl: Plus, multiple photos in short periods of time suggesting the same bee but an attempt to game the leaderboard. Or inexperienced users who don’t know how to upload multiple photos in one observation or who are not sure whether all the photos are the same bee. I don’t thin…

I’m pretty convinced that, no matter what iNat or local organizers or anybody does or could do in the future to try to teach observers how to use iNat “properly,” some observers will screw things up, just because they are human. I’ve certainly done it and I’m a very experienced iNat user and a retir…

Good to hear a broken record sometimes!

While it seems inevitable there will be these issues after a Bioblitz, I think the organizers should be more responsible for going in and fixing the issues on their Bioblitz - IDing unknowns, adding comments on duplicates, marking DQA’s for cultivated or multiple species, etc instead of that cleanup…

What about an “Preselection” before you can join a Bioblitz? Needs 10 previous RG observations with full annotation before an Obs. is accepted during the period of the Bioblitz.

Unfortunately, some organizers are just as flighty as the observers - they are on iNat for the period of the event, and then they too disappear. The event I was looking at had this problem. And overall, I think some events are driven by a well meaning but misguided intent to have a community event…

Not sure how this fixes the overall problem, unless your thought is that observers have some pre-event familiarity with iNat.

[image] spiphany: other words, it is also about not knowing what is involved in biodiversity recording and that collecting good data requires a bit of thought and work – it isn’t a matter of just uploading an observation and iNat magically does the rest; iNat is merely a tool for storing and org…

I think this might be a result of conflicting priorities between the Inat community and the hosts of many Bio-blitzes. I am guessing that most long term regular users of Inaturalist would rank high quality scientific data pretty near the top of our priorities when using the site. On the other hand m…

Bioblitzes and observation quality…or quantity over quality

General

klauswehrlin January 30, 2026, 5:55pm 11

What about an “Preselection” before you can join a Bioblitz?

Needs 10 previous RG observations with full annotation before an Obs. is accepted during the period of the Bioblitz.

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Bioblitzes and observation quality…or quantity over quality

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