I recently took some pictures at my local beach of broken glass, and a seemingly lost plastic toy car, and that got me thinking. Humans are animals, and are part of the ecosystem, and these objects are clear signs of their impact. Observations are allowed to be just evidence of an organism’s presence, so why not? I can’t imagine this idea is new, so why are there no human observations on iNat? Or at least none that come up when I search for them.
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Human observations are automatically casual grade so they don’t show up in searches that don’t include casual observations
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iNaturalist is not the forum to upload these kind of observations
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You could, but it would be a waste of iNat’s resources and storage space.
Humans and signs of humans are everywhere on the planet now. There is literally no place you can go where you do not find signs of humans, if you know what to look for and have the equipment to do so.
The point of iNat is not to record things about humans, but to record all the non-human life.
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If your beach debris is … home to a hermit crab - yes, that fits iNat.
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The fact that you were there to take the picture means that there was a human at the site, so strictly you could upload a picture taken by yourself anywhere at all and upload it. It just isn’t useful
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There are likely better citizen science apps than iNat for documenting litter.
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iNaturalist was never intended to be the be-all-end-all of everything nature-related. If we try to be all things to all people, we will end up being of no use to anyone.
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There are currently 121,853 observations identified as “human” on iNat, but you have to uncheck the “verifiable” box in the search filters to see them, since human observations are casual.
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The iNaturalist FAQ article linked above gives the answer to this question, along with other suggested platforms for posting these items, so I’m going to consider this question solved and close the topic. Thanks all for chiming in.
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