the script we’re running finds all the Bowerbird observation ids for the Bowerbird user who requested the assistance and then just loops through all those observation ids.
If you had the list of your Bowerbird observation ids that you wanted to move, we could run the migration on them. But I’m a bit worried that since you already have manually moved the vast majority of your records, there might be the potential for lots of duplicates to be introduced if your not careful.
Do you have a way to come up with a list of your own Bowerbird observation ids that you know you did not already manually post to iNaturalist?
I haven’t actually moved any BB records to inat (i.e. no duplication). I have contacted ALA to see if they are willing to help save all the BowerBird data but that may take a few days for them to reply. I have also asked Ken from BowerBird how long he expects the servers to remain online. I assume it will still be for at least a month (probably 3). I have yet to decide what I want to do (e.g. only transfer ones missing from ALA).
One BB member has contacted me and brought up an important point. I referred them to you @reiner. Graeme Cocks died last year - he is the one at the top of @loarie 's list with more than 8000 observations. Is it possible to set up an account on iNat on his behalf, or under a pseudonym? Would we need to speak to his next of kin?
I was aware of that. Also many lighter users won’t bother transferring. I was going to download all BB records when I’m back home. I’m not sure what the licensing is with data but I think photos can be individually licensed. If the licensing permits all sorts of things could be achieved. :)
Thats great that reiner has a plan to generate an archive of the entire Bowerbird dataset so that it can be uploaded to ALA. iNaturalist’s is role slightly different in that it is not primarily an archive but importantly can provide a place for the Bowerbird community to continue sharing identifications and observations if they choose. Bringing over a user’s individual observations can be an important part of preserving/re-establishing their identity on iNaturalist. But if iNaturalist can leave the archiving of important observations from people who are no longer with us or those who are not interested in moving to iNaturalist to others, that would be fantastic.
I made a brief tutorial aimed at helping BowerBird users who are interested in giving iNaturalist a try but are completely new to the site a quick orientation. It includes sections on (1) the ‘assisted migration’ of observations (2) the BowerBird project on iNaturalist (3) core functionality: uploading, exploring, and identifying observations and (4) communicating with users. I hope its useful
If you know of anyone else in the BowerBird community who might be interested in helping move their data to iNaturalist, please have them contact help@inaturalist.org
Amazing work! I’m not directly impacted by this myself, but I enjoyed going through the species list from the link you posted and appreciate having the additional records available on iNaturalist.
That’s awesome. I know at least one other person who hasn’t got around to doing it.
I ran my software yesterday and downloaded all records and put them in a Darwin Core compatible CSV (about 6MB compressed). https://files.fm/u/va3y7rct
There was a minor bug in my code soemwhere and I had to manually fix about 100 records that had an extra column. Most column headers are Darwin Core standards. Because observations can have multiple images the last two columns (photo license and URL) repeat.
The download run took around 5 1/2 hours and found 95795 records from 0 to 126,999.
The missing observations just return blank pages - I’m not sure what happened to them but suspect starting a new observation reserves the record number and if the observation isn’t completed then nothing is saved.
14:34:34.531 Starting 0 to 126999...
20:05:16.546 Observations processed: 95795
20:05:16.578 Finished in 331min
Now a big job to do is go through and copy all of Dr Leigh winsor’s excellent land planarian ID’s. Unfortunately most of the tree under flatworms was missing in BowerBird so all his ID’s were in comments and those comments were always expansive and amazing.
Thanks for the heads up. I have very few records on BowerBird myself. I can let the admins of UQ Volunteers know about this and also let the Entomological Society of Queensland members know if they are not already aware.
I think I have transferred all the excellent flatworm commentary across…
Currently submitting all observations to the Wayback Machine for preservation. They only had around a thousand archived. Unfortunately you can’t submit a whole site so I wrote a program to submit all observation pages. Half way through now… BowerBird on Internet Archive
Not sure if my previous post on this topic got through (I don’t see it) - so trying again.
Australia has quite a few citizen science projects similar to iNat; and they also provide the data to ALA (and I’m not talking about QuestaGame here, which has a different market base).
Australian communities have worked hard and invested a lot of resource to build these projects. I assume this is true with many other countries.
iNat is doing some excellent work and everyone involved should be commended. But like every other Internet community, it has biases, which none of us can recognise for ourselves until we run up against other cultures and ways of doing things.
Front-end developments are about culture, which is fine. But if we want greater collaboration and engagement with nature - which is critical more broadly - perhaps it should be less about homogenising communities and cultures, i.e. getting them to share a single platform with its inherent biases. In a field that cries out for more diversity and inclusion, such a path seems narrow to me.
Perhaps it should be more about allowing collaboration between front-ends and encouraging agnostic back-ends. Admittedly, the recent evolution of the Internet has made this more difficult - causing more fracturing - but that doesn’t mean we should give in to it. Mapping biodiversity is about 1s and 0s, nothing more, and there’s a million ways to skin data-communications.
Hence, I have to say - seeing comments like “RIP Bowerbird…Long live iNat” is disappointing to see.
Instead, IMHO, it would be great to see iNat, Ken Walker, the ALA and everyone else encouraging BowerBird users to join any one of a number of projects (including iNat; Carrie says she has a list) that collect photo data for the Atlas of Living Australia and/or GBIF; and then work in collaboration to allow easy back-end sharing. iNat could be a great leader here.
What I meant with “RIP Bowerbird…Long live iNat” is that it is sad to see BowerBird (and its community) die because the front end (what users use) had increasing and insurmountable problems. The comment about iNat is that I hope iNat lives much longer. People familiarize themselves with an interface so change complicates things and iNat’s front end is much busier than BB. But iNat is not stagnating.
Many users have now taken advantage of the assisted migration service and there are now 36,900 records from BB on iNat (of 95796).
PS. I hope you get over your “bureaucratic” issues with iNat because I like how QuestaGame encourages awareness of nature.
Yeah, bowerbird didn’t go away because people wanted to homogenize it with Inaturalist. It went away for other reasons and if inat weren’t here the community would just be gone.
I don’t see the harm in one main place for this type of data. Makes things a lot easier and inat doesn’t have an assigned culture. I agree that the separate entities don’t matter much if there’s a data aggregator. But gbif isn’t that well integrated in the other direction. I can see the points on the map but you can’t have a discussion like you can here.