I completely agree with this. The idea that iNat is primarily for your personal engagement with nature to me seems really fraught, if it’s just that why don’t we retire iNaturalist and just focus on Seek or a Pokemon Go style gamified app? I’m obviously being facetious here, but the point remains that iNaturalist is a great repository for biodiversity data and that’s something iNat rightly promotes and is proud of.
I also understand the challenges that the staff must have in trying to bat off established, funded institutions trying to pass off their data management and costs onto iNat which - to me - is why “It’s NOT a repository for external data” gets so clearly highlighted in the about page.
But in circumstances like this, it feels like it’s a bit of a cop out.
- There’s a clear potential scientific AND personal (for the family) upside in archiving these observations and having them meaningfully contribute to knowledge;
- There’s no downside, this isn’t a circumstance where an established institution can’t be bothered setting up / funding their own records;
- Most importantly, there isn’t a clear alternative - sure you could email GBIF and try to get set up as a new publisher and dataset (which involves - and I quote - “receiv[ing] endorsement as a data publisher from one of the Participant nodes that coordinate activities of the national and organizational Participants in the GBIF network.”, and then convert all your records to darwin core and then work out how to batch upload them. But, like, that’s seriously a completely unreasonable burden.
Indeed, GBIF explicitly says as an individual wishing to contribute you should “share records through one of the many citizen science platforms that publish records to GBIF”.
This honestly seems like such a slam dunk of exactly how iNaturalist can and should be used that a lot of this discussion seems very absurd to me.
edit: This is a particularly good explanation of why we don’t want institutions piggy-backing off iNaturalist for their own curation - and why that guideline exists in the about page. But i don’t think it’s applicable here.