I wonder if it would be possible to set up an “In Memoriam” page on iNat that links to the profile pages for those iNaturalist contributors who have died? It would not only be a nice way to immortalize our community members, but also serve as a place where people could check to see if someone they are trying to contact regarding a record is no longer around.
Maybe it would be nice to also be able to have an admin mark on their profile page that they died. I know some users have had that done, but others have not.
Obviously there would need to be strict guidelines on how a user’s account was closed like this, but it would be useful.
Just a thought, as we begin to age as naturalists?
out of curiosity (and not to derail the discussion), but upon scanning thru a few of the accounts in that project, i notice that several of them have bios that either previously specified/have been updated posthumously to reflect their intentions to have their observations remain on the site in the event of their death. is that practice something necessary for the observations to remain up?
iNat is something that’s important to me, and most everyone in my life knows that, but i don’t know if my loved ones would know to contact iNat or access my account to put that in my bio in the event of my death.
Someone previously proposed having a dedicated page on the forum for In Memoriam messages. The compromise was to have In Memoriam in the topic and put under Nature Tslk.
No. iNat has no way of knowing that the account holder has died, and accounts are not paid, nor will they lapse if users do not log in after a certain amount of time.
If you want your relatives to inform people on your social media networks in the event of your death, you may wish to consider mentioning this explicitly in your testament (and providing account names/passwords so that they are able to do so).
I fully understand and support the reasoning that staff are unable to verify that a deceased person is the owner of a specific account – i.e., that iNat will not mark accounts.
But I wonder whether this would also be true for a user-controlled account designation – i.e., a system by which account holders (or their heirs) could change the status of the account to indicate that the account-holder is deceased or that the account is (temporarily or permanently) inactive. There might be use cases for such a function other than death. For example, if a user plans to leave iNat but does not want to delete their account, or if they need to take a break for a time.
I certainly wish something could be done. Every now and then I come across a prolific iNat user who has not been active in a while and I wonder if they have passed on. Sometimes I’ll spend some time online to see if I can find an obituary. Quite often I don’t and I am left to wonder. Just this morning I came across one such account of a Californian naturalist and though I could not find an official obit, I did find an article indicating she had passed in the newsletter of a local organization. I have no way of knowing if she was the person on iNat, but it seems likely given the matching name and area of interest.