I would love to have a place where I could upload and gather information about noteworthy records of rare animals, such as vagrants or extinct species. I’m not talking about my own observations, but rather about historical observations published elsewhere, like in newspapers or scientific journals.
Is this something I can do on Inat or would this be frowned upon, as they are not my own sightings?
Kind regards
Mathieu
You can just create a project, and add observations to them.
Pictures in books or scientific journals are usually copyrighted. You can’t post them on iNaturalist or anywhere else.
This doesn’t answer your question, but there’s a lot of this kind of stuff happening in eBird with historical record aggregator accounts for records not otherwise entered by observers (see for example https://ebird.org/checklist/S101965394 and https://ebird.org/profile/NDEyMzQ5/US-TX).
I think for iNat there would be copy right issues for media, which could be problematic.
I suspect that many of the records you would want to upload might already exist in other big databases like GBIF or VertNet so there wouldn’t be much of a need to upload them here as well.
This could be really cool for species described after iNat observations. Also even for type specimens in museums.
For plants at least, type specimens are being scanned and posted, both through their home herbaria and through JSTOR.
First, before i could add them to a project, I would need to upload most of these records to Inat in the first place. Since they are not my own sightings, I’d want to create an aggregator account. I’d be careful to upload any copyrighted pictures, but at least I could add correct date, place and a link or citation to the original source.
From what I can find, quite many records are not yet in GBIF, I don’t know most of the other sites named here.
iNat accounts are personal obs. Your engagement with nature.
I totally get the desire to do this, but iNat is about your own personal experiences with nature, it’s not a repository for external data.
OK i have misinterpreted the original post. I thought not my own observations meaning other observations on inat…but if they are from an already published source then thats a no.
Yes, but I was talking about species described because of an iNat observation; and herbarium specimens that someone uploads as a resident at the herbarium or some other special way.
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