I agree with a lot of what others have said. Posting old photos, as interesting as they can be, isn’t really what iNat is for (it’s for the user’s experiences), and I wouldn’t post pics like this. A small number of observations is probably fine (my ballpark would be <20), even if it is a gray area, but more really shouldn’t be done in my mind and based on what I’ve seen staff say.
I don’t think creating a second account for someone who is no longer living is a good idea, as iNat has pretty strong rules against multiple accounts except in specific situations.
This seems like one of those areas where there’s conflict between iNat’s two missions (biodiversity database vs. connecting people with nature).
My grandfather has been visiting remote areas of Peru and a couple other countries in South America for many years, and while he isn’t a naturalist he does have a lot of photos of random flowers and other plants he saw along the way. He wouldn’t be interested in uploading them to iNat himself, but I could probably get a reasonable estimate of locations and dates from his notes and there could be some interesting records in there for under-documented regions.
This is a gray area where a few photos that you have permission to post and have a connection to are probably fine, but it shouldn’t be done systematically or at large scale. iNat’s not a data repository for outside data sets, it’s a community that shares and discusses their observations. What scale are we talking about here, @ nightcapranger? (Also, I’m sorry for your loss)
Yeah, this. Like i can’t square how ‘inaturalist is only for your own observations and experience so you can’t post a photo your grandmother made, however you must accept all experimental taxonomy proposed by any iNat curator even if it doesn’t match your experience with nature at all’. I don’t think iNat always navigates this stuff well. Given all of the factors involved, i’d think these photos would be encouraged, not discouraged. It’s true that the grandmother can’t participate in discussion about it, but neither can anyone else who’s passed away and i certainly don’t hope we start deleting observations when people die.
And i really feel like iNat needs to decide what it is. All across the board it’s been really erratic with this stuff in my opinion, and it leads to a lot of frustration and worse.
I don’t know if there’s a conflict, as, as I understand it, the PRIMARY mission of iNat is to get YOU engaging with nature (PERSONAL observations with nature)
And the SECONDARY mission of iNat is a biodiversity database.
Whenever the primary mission conflicts with the secondary mission (which happens all the time), staff default to the primary mission (much to the chagrin of hundreds of identifiers).
I worded the above as a statement, but it’s actually a question, as I’m not sure if my interpretation is correct.
There were some changes in the wording of this around 2022. If you look at the old version of the “What is it?” page it ranked them by primary and secondary goals in the way you described. However the current About and What is it? pages present both aspects of the mission equally.
This leads to a follow-up comment, which is that, as iNat becomes basically mandatory for anyone involved in biodiversity surveying (as it becomes an essential part of modern science, if it isn’t already), they won’t have the “luxury” of prioritizing personal observations.
At some point, the value of saving an endangered species, documenting a range expansion, etc., takes priority over your thousandth mallard observation! Does that makes sense? I am describing a shift of the mission priority, whether we like it or not.
Yeah, we see some research scientists uploading photos of their specimen collections, and others see that and it makes iNat seem like a great platform for digitizing museum collections. Which I see no issue with personally as long as they don’t use a personal account to do it from, but at that point it’s definitely crossing the “NOT a repository for external data” line that iNat has chosen. You could see a big collection of old photograph data in the same light I guess. But there is nowhere else to put something like that, that I know of. Especially if you don’t have the ability to identify the subjects of the photos on your own.
I think it’s a fun and meaningful project to connect with nature and see nature through your grandparent’s eyes. As you say, you own the intellectual property, so there is no copyright issue. I considered a similar project with scanned slides from my grandparents, but most of the slides I have are more people than nature shots so only a few would really be reasonable observations, and even those I could really only guess at the date and location. The most usuable ones for inat observations from the scanned slides would be hunted antelope from a hunting trip, which I am unsure if I want to actually post.
Perhaps it would be best to initially limit your focus to a curated selection of particularly interesting pictures, ones with interesting personal stories or meaning, and ones where you know the date and location with reasonable precision.
The scientific value of older observations especially vastly outweighs the concerns over whether the person has direct (first-hand) experience with the observation. In a way, being the ancestor of the current poster, its almost like that person has added their data to iNat through their descendants.
These historical observations are never coming back, so if someone is a relative of the original observer, I don’t see why this would be a problem, even on a large scale.
"Biologists Richard Primack and Abraham Miller-Rushing looked in an odd place to study the biological effects of global warming: old photographs. By comparing contemporary photos with shots from a century ago, “you can literally see that trees are leafing out and the plants are flowering earlier now,” says Primack, of Boston University. He hopes their study, published this month in the American Journal of Botany, will spur citizens to dig up more climate change data from their old photo albums and journals.
“The duo examined 286 dated photographs of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts. They found that plants are flowering and trees are leafing 10 days earlier today than they were 100 years ago. Primack credits the three degree Fahrenheit temperature rise in eastern Massachusetts over the past century with jump-starting plant development in the spring.”
If we’re concerned with helping biodiversity via high-quality observations (those with a relatively precise date and location), we should be willing to accept some flexing of the criteria to second-hand observations by relatives, especially in the context of climate change. As the authors of the scientific article state: “Dated photographs of plants in flower represent a new resource to extend the range of species and localities addressed in global-warming research.”
I have the same issue as well with one observation I put up from a relative who would likely never make a profile themselves, but gave me the precise date and location where it was found. I am sure this is a widespread scenario that could be addressed and accepted to increase historical (or even contemporary) data.
Some explicit notes on who was the original collector, the relationship to the current poster, and any notes that were written on the photo or told to the observer should be noted though.
Perhaps there could be a kind of parallel, historical repository? For all Observations over a certain age? It would need to be understood that data there would be a little less scrutinizeable in that due to either time elapsed or death of Observer no further info would be available?
Because either “a few are OK” or “this is important data” in which case the more the better. No?
(Hi, my name is Lucy. I am hyper-organized, excel at complicated processes, and I do not enjoy “gray areas”. )
Our approach towards advancing biodiversity science and conservation is to focus on supporting a large healthy community using the platform to generate, share, explore and curate data rather than focusing on accruing data. As such, iNat is not a data repository and isn’t a good place to drop off external data not generated on the platform. Please check out GBIF as an appropriate repository.
We often get people asking if they can import a museum collection or other large repository, and this the type data we don’t want added to iNat because it generally doesn’t come actively stewerded and wasn’t really reflective of somoene’s personal experience witih nature. That doesns’t meant it isn’t useful, but there are places like GBIF or IDigBio that are better fits. iNat can’t be everything to everyone.What’s cool is that there’s a place like GBIF that can actually be a repository for occurence data generated via sort of different means and platforms.
As Caleb said, the About page no longer says that the primary goal is to connect people to nature and second to generate sicentifically usable data. It says something much cleaner:
Mission: iNaturalist’s mission is to connect people to nature and advance biodiversity science and conservation.
We believe iNat can achieve both of these goals simultaneously - in fact that they reinforce one another
I don’t think iNat would be passing 500k taxa if it didn’t have both that social, personal element as well as the emphasis on science and data quality. People want to contribute because they enjoy it, and also because they care about generated data that’s usable.
Mainly that we see frequent threads primarily about the quality of the data. And frequent threads like this one in that they are primarily about expanding the accepted kinds of data.
Just wanted to clarify in case anyone sees these statements and reads them as contradictory; what isn’t allowed is having sockpuppets, i.e. multiple accounts that interact with each other. Most commonly that would be IDing the other account’s observations, or third party observations that have already been IDed by the other account. In come cases commenting on the same content without being clear about being the same person could also be sockpuppetry.
Separate accounts that never interact can be ok. For example, I have seen cases where a person has an account that only posts or IDs observations of Taxon X, and another account that posts or IDs only observations that are not Taxon X. They state that clearly in their bio, and I haven’t seen any issue caused by it.
So I think it would be ok to create a separate account only for a grandparent’s pictures, but the relationship should be made that clear in the account’s bio, and the main account should never ID the grandparent account’s observations.
I wasn’t aware of that thread. However, as several users discuss as a scenario in the other thread, I believe the case I remember is because one account obscures all of their observations to make things like interpolation of obscured locations harder, and the other does not.
I was really just trying to paraphrase the community guidelines as I understand them, which also say that alternate accounts interacting is the fundamental prohibition, and that accounts that have completely discrete roles can be allowable:
(!) Sockpuppet accounts. A sockpuppet account is an additional account set up to evade suspension, circumvent restrictions in functionality, or other forms of bad behavior, like confirming your own identifications. This does not include multiple accounts set up for multiple roles, e.g. a personal account and a professional account.
I do think it is reasonable to discourage having multiple accounts in this way (in part to avoid accidentally interacting), but I hadn’t read that as an absolute prohibition.
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.
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