I have a passive acoustic monitor (Haikubox) running 24/7 with hundreds of thousands of calls identified per year. I have several graphical summaries of particular species that may be of interest. Are they worthwhile to post on iNaturalist?
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I think as long as passive acoustic recordings are identified with a high level of certainty and the metadata are accurate, the observations are worth posting. Itâs no different than trail camera images.
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if youâre not posting these for yourself, and youâre trying to post your data for others to use, then i would say that bird data like this should be posted to eBird, not iNaturalist. if you loaded this sort of data into iNatuarlist, i assume you would not have images or audio recordings to go with your recordings, and so they would end up being casual grade observations. few people look at this sort of data in iNaturalist, and casual observations never get pushed over to GBIF, either.
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Iâm not sure what your systemâs âgraphical summariesâ are, but that sounds like a summary of multiple observations at different times. iNaturalist observations should be of a single organism at a single time (reasonably interpreted), so this doesnât sound appropriate for iNaturalist. If you have surprising results, I hope you will post them on eBird so people can follow up (though I would note that my passive acoustic recorder has several times identified a clapper rail as a white-breasted nuthatch).
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And a human observer
Yes, these are summaries Iâve made from the year weâve been running the monitor. eBird only accepts audio files from monitors, not any information derived from an event, such as a graphical summary. Iâve been working through our downloaded data and found artefacts that are shared with Haikubox for inclusion in their training set, but also Iâve seen some fun things like detections of the endangered marbled murrelet as it makes its way to nesting sites in the area. Season, time of day, and locale are all consistent with visual and radar observations that have been madeâthe map is from a paper summarizing several years of surveys done by a Humboldt Redwood Company, and our monitorâs location is shown as âHaikuboxâ. Iâve been looking for a forum where things like this might be shared.
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Remotely sensed data is not supposed to be added to eBird (with the exceptions of NFCs, which can be uploaded under special protocols).
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Yes, the type of data above isnât a good fit for iNat - youâd need a photo, audio file, or sketch made from life and for the ID to be made via your own expertise (not just posting an automated ID for something you didnât evaluate yourself). That doesnât mean the data arenât interesting or valuable (they seem like they are), but they just donât seem to match up with iNatâs goals/guidelines.
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Why should that matter? A trail camera is still an observation of an organism at a specific time and place. So is an audio recorder.
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Hi David,
Welcome to the forum!
This thread from the GBIF forum might give you some ideas:
https://discourse.gbif.org/t/best-practices-to-publish-soundscapes-in-gbif/4253
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The summaries should not be posted here. If you wanted to upload individual sections of recording at the location of the ARU and with the time and datestamp of the observation being the beginning of the recording then I donât see why this would be any different than other sound recordings of birds that people upload. A human observer is not a requirement of iNaturalist since trail camera images are allowed. ARUs are no different than a trail cam in that they are both remote sensing devices with set trigger parameters and generally no immediate direct human control/supervision. I would suggest keeping the recording snippets to those with prominent and identifiable calls and doing at least a decently fine grade initial id so that if there are multiple overlapping calls people know which bird call/song is the subject of the observation.
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I would read the help in this sense
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000192921-how-to-make-an-observation
I also faintly remember this had been a topic in other discussions.
For practical reasons I would think automatic observation would better suit to another platform, maybe GBIF itself, eBird
iNaturalist would expect a second opinion to make it research grade. With thousands repeated observations of the same common species it might be to much for the volunteers who should do the work
As stated in previous comments, this wouldnât be appropriate for eBird.
The help article you linked to in the previous comment doesnât really address whether audio recordings from autonomous recording units, images from camera traps, etc. are allowed on iNat. Longstanding precedent is that these sorts of things are ok to upload within reason, as long as 1. the recording device is actually yours (rather than, say, a live wildlife camera online, screenshots from which would be prohibited on iNat) and 2. youâre actually manually vetting any recordings before upload (in other words, you arenât automatically uploading to iNat whatever images/audio the sensor captured by the hundreds or even thousands, often without any IDs and regardless of whether thereâs even anything identifiable in a given image/audio recording; doing so removes the personal aspect of these iNat observations, and, like you said, would overwhelm identifiers on iNat). (Recordings captured by the monitor in question, assuming theyâve been saved, would fulfill the first criterion, but it sounds like thereâd be far too many to review by oneself in a reasonable timeframe, so any uploading of them to iNat would have to represent a tiny subset of the totalâand the summaries themselves wouldnât qualify as iNat observations, since they donât represent a single encounter at a single point in time.)
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There is another article in the help section that relates to the topic and your thoughts
Photos or sounds attached to observations should include evidence of the actual organism at the time of the observation, observed by the user who is uploading the observation. Media used in your iNaturalist observations should represent your own experiences, not just examples of something similar to what you saw.
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The excerpt you quoted doesnât really pertain to whether itâs permitted to upload photos/audio recordings from a remote recording device (again, those have pretty much always been allowed on iNat, provided theyâre yours and theyâre manually inspected and curated before upload): itâs saying that media attached to an observation should be of the specific organism being observed at the specific time and place of your observation (rather than, say, an image of the same species you found on the internet or something, or a photo that you took of that species at an entirely different time and/or place). If you go to the end of the same paragraph in that article, youâll see ââŚplease do not upload screenshots from broadcasts of live cameras unless you are the owner of the live cameraâ (emphasis mine)âi.e., if you own a live camera, youâre free to upload screenshots from it.
The examples on the info page on machine generated content on the site are even more relevant:
Examples of prohibited behavior (non-exhaustive):
- Machine generated observations would include observations posted from automated systems such as camera traps posted with no human moderation/oversight in the process.
âŚ
Examples of acceptable behavior (non-exhaustive):
âŚ
- Manually curating a selection of photos from a camera trap and uploading them as observations
(emphasis mine)
Just for fun, hereâs the general Camera Traps (Trail-cams) project (there are dozens of more specific trail-cam-related projects as well); in the 8 years since it was started, itâs accumulated over 100,000 observations by nearly 4,000 iNat users!
(and thatâs where iâll leave things, since this is starting to veer a little away from the original topic)
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Thx. I guess this explains much better the doâs and donâts.
I faintly remembered that content but didnât find the way back.
I make plenty of observations and am well-aware in how to make them :)
My point was that, contrary to your assertion that a human observer is required, an audio recorder is still a viable way of making an observation. All you need is clear audio, a GPS co-ordinate (which can be manually entered), and a timestamp (which can also be manually entered). This is the same as stills from a trail camera. Recordings from automatic observers can be uploaded via the web, or also via iPhone and Android apps.
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