Charlie, (getting off topic) but have you seen VegBank?
http://vegbank.org/vegbank/index.jsp
Somewhat useful for getting quantitative data on plant abundance.
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I have seen it! I haven’t played around with it much but it could be useful for plots for sure. Does it have an app interface like inat?
No I think the interface is pretty much what you see there. We have another really useful tool in CA for getting checklists called “what grows here?”
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Maybe the issue is ‘from a science perspective’, but there are groups that are grateful for presence-only information. I work with a group on butterfly and moth atlases at a provincial level. We aggregate data from multiple sources (iNat, eButterfly, BOLD, GBIF etc) and, collectively, it is a very powerful dataset. Would more detail be nice? Maybe, but don’t underestimate what is here. Interesting provincial and national ‘firsts’ have shown up on iNat.
The lack of a standardized ‘count’ annotation has been driving me nuts for years. But the iNat admins have declared that annotations cannot be quantititive:
It makes no sense to me, but that is the imposed reality. Please add your voice to this thread if you would like to provide feedback on the topic:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lets-talk-annotations/627
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I don’t know for sure, but your “weekly ‘feeder’ or ‘home’ lists” may actually be more valuable for eBird than your “more unusual sightings” because regular complete lists are important for estimating species departures and arrivals, abundance, etc. But to be fair they are less enjoyable lists to make than posting unusual species, and the unusual sightings would be useful for local researchers or other interested people to learn about what’s in the area and how that changes over the years though.
Here is eBird’s official research page: https://ebird.org/science
I think their mapping projects require the complete presence and absence data that eBird checklists provide and iNaturalist observations don’t.
They also have this list of publications, but I don’t know if all of them used exclusively eBird data or if they pulled bird data from multiple sources through GBIF.
(Also see related thread here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/submit-the-same-sightings-to-both-ebird-and-inaturalist/1852)
I think this is a good point, the lack of any communication within eBird (so they don’t have to moderate) is a drawback. Although I sort of doubt that the birding community will move to iNaturalist, because it is pretty established on facebook with a large network of facebook groups. But perhaps changes to facebook will change that.
Here are a couple examples of discussion of significant rare birds originally found on iNaturalist: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/2343708, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/16295265
I’m sure there was also extensive discussion of those birds on other forums.
And iNaturalist is also much better for identifying unknown birds, either from audio or photos. The system on eBird currently pretty much guarantees that if you post an unidentified bird photo at any level (passerine sp., Catherus sp., Sharp-shinned/Cooper’s Hawk, whatever), you will never get an ID through eBird; you have to post it somewhere else to get it identified. I think this could be improved a lot but it’s just not designed for that kind of interaction. (It’s technically possible: you can report the ID of the bird in the photo and that will be sent to the reviewer, who can email the user who submitted it, but this is sort of discouraged I think)
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I am an avid user of both platforms. I don’t like dual entry of photos but don’t find it too onerous.
I use the eBird app to log every bird I see or hear and include numbers and complete lists. I like the way it records a visit to an area with a checklist. The app makes it very easy to record observations and numbers. It integrates with Merlin so can check songs and images in the field to help me make an identification.
Later in the day I use eBird on the web. I upload photos and share checklists with others in my group. I use eBird to see where others are birding, track visits to my favorites sights, explore hotspots before I go, track my ‘year’ and ‘life’ needs for a region, and receive eBird alerts. Many of my friends use eBird and not iNat. All they are interested in are birds, and I don’t see them making the switch. It serves my needs as a birder.
I do not use the iNat app. I have tried, but I find it takes too much effort in the field. I photograph birds, insects, plants, and anything and everything. I process them at home and then up load to iNat many of my images and definitely the ones that I would like help with an id. I have an extra burden of posting to my own website and sometimes Facebook. I am an avid user of iNat for looking things up, following some people and locations. I love iNat and am an avid user, but don’t know how it would successfully integrate with or replace eBird. For now, I think I will be stuck with both platforms.
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Thank you for starting this thread, colincroft. I used to be a very keen eBird user - I have more than 5,000 checklists in their system, including about half of all the data submitted for the Rainy River District of Northwestern Ontario, Canada. I joined iNat three years after I began using eBird, and originally I was submitting my bird observations exclusively to eBird.
However…I left eBird in December 2017, after the site implemented their sensitive species embargo. I disagree - very strongly - with how the embargo has been applied to Northwestern Ontario. (That’s another thread for another forum.) iNat’s treatment of sensitive species in my remote part of the continent is evidence-based, consistent, transparent, and respectful of users’ rights to their data.
Another key difference between the two platforms is that iNaturalist emphasizes collaboration, while eBird emphasizes competition. I am not a competitive observer, and I prefer iNat’s non-hierarchical, crowd-sourcing approach.
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That would be really cool, although I could see it being an issue where my bird observations with photos on iNat are already part of complete (i.e. non-incidental) checklists on eBird. The opposite function would almost be more useful for me, where I could automatically submit a photo or sound from an eBird checklist to iNat. The two platforms are so different in their function, though, so I’m not sure if this kind of feature would ever be possible.
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Somewhere someone wrote a tool that does just this (it is not automatc, but you choose to import). I will see if I can find it, its likely on Github. I never used it, so I cant comment on how user friendly it is. I seem to remember it was 1 way though, import from Ebird to iNat, but that could be just poor memory.
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Again…wonderful discussion here. I’ve read it several times to get a better feel for all the good points that have been made.
Quick question for those of you using both platforms: have any of you included links to specific iNat observations in your eBird Checklists as a way to save some time (rather than manually loading photos into eBird, etc.)? I can add the text of the link itself into the Comments section for particular species easy enough, but it doesn’t show up as an an actual functional link…just the address that someone would have to manually copy/paste to get to the iNat Observation…
Thanks!
I’m sure given the situation with Observation Fields, that there is more than 1, but there is an Observation Field called Associated Observation which takes a hyperlink (so for instance you can add a link to the ebird checklist) as input. Possibly a better solution than the comments section as that is a bit of a data black hole.
I may have added (tried to) links once or twice but mainly, if there’s some reason I want to note it, I’ll mention in the comments in either the species notes or the checklist notes, that I have also made an observation on iNat with photos. I did this is the earlier days of my iNat use, especially, because I had no concept of the amazing utility of iNat and was constantly cross-referencing the sites for my own haphazard “record-keeping” before discovering that everything I couldn’t stand about ebird queries was solved by using iNat. Now I don’t bother. In fact, I’m caught off guard now when I run into folks in the supermarket who tell me they’ve been reading my checklists, I forget that there’s an audience of people possibly following your activity. Weirds me.
I want to wholeheartedly second all of this. Although, I find it more fun than the average person to count my common feeder birds (although my feeder birds aren’t your average feeder birds!) and watch the evolution of individual icterids as they learn to eat from upside suet feeders and do new neat tricks. Also, the benefits to daily, complete lists of birds in one spot over time are shared with you too…much easier to notice a pine siskin or redpoll in with the other finches if you’re in the habit of checking frequently and carefully. Personally,I find the behavioral side even more interesting than the listing part. (yes, I’m this long-winded on eBird comments too) 
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Can you clarify? What makes “point data” (which is what iNat mostly is) tricky to use for occurrence and range? If you are aiming to make any quantitative research, e.g. where the species is more or less common, then it would be tricky. But just for “filling out a map” on the general range, I don’t immediately see why this could be more than straightforward.
I use both eBird and iNaturalist. All the bird data goes to eBird. If I happen to get useful photos or recordings, I’ll cross-post to iNaturalist. But I won’t submit non-photo/non-evidence based observations to iNat unless it is a “life species” or really significant.
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It’s not that it’s point data, it’s that it’s presence-only with no effort information. Essentially, it shows you where a species occurs but you have no way of knowing whether spatial gaps represent true absences or just lack of effort. For an example, here’s Willow Flycatcher’s Explore page.
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/16611-Empidonax-traillii
If we were to build a range map from the iNat points, it would miss huge swaths of the species’ actual range. 6 U.S. states and one Canadian province would be excluded, and that’s in two countries with some of the highest #'s of iNat users.
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I tried to address this above: the issue is using iNat in isolation may not be adequate, but if you aggregate it with other (point data) sources, you can build something quite useful. Effort is nice-to-have, but not required for all purposes.
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The bottom line is there are tons of different uses for different types of data. Inat data isn’t useful for some quantitive stuff sure but I think of it more as a huge field notebook we all take notes in together. Even those of us in academia only publish a few papers and meanwhile all this observational data is super useful for applied ecology and management if you get familiar with it. While people in academia push to publish a bunch of other people struggle with limited resources to make conservation decisions and understand what is going on on the ground.
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Sorry, I should have been more clear. I’m primarily interested in linking to an iNat observation from somewhere in the eBird checklist. I tried using the html code with the link to the iNat Observation ("<a href=" ___________" etc.)…but no actual link gets created.
I can obviously just include something like “iNaturalist Observation with photos here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/25094783” but then the viewer has to manually copy/paste that address.
I was just curious whether anyone had discovered a way to create an actual working link to an iNat Observation somewhere in an eBird Checklist :)
You can use HTML code around a link to make it clickable in the species comments.
Well I thought I had done that, but no link is getting created. Here’s what I used:
FYI: Here’s the eBird checklist I’m working with: https://ebird.org/view/checklist/S56355311