For North American Bombus there are currently 2354 pages worth of observations that I still have to get through. Duplicates needlessly add to that. If 10 people are on a nature hike and all take pictures, yes there will be several people uploading the same things which is fine, but we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about the guy in the group who uploaded the same thing as much as 15 times (yes, I’ve seen that). And really, I’ve led iNat centered nature walks, I’ve never seen more than a couple people focus on the same thing, even when I’m pointing it out and talking about it.
To add to that, some species that people upload require seeing it from a couple of angles to ID, if all of the pictures are in the same observation, no problem, it gets ID’d and out of needs ID. If they’re all in different observations, then we have two problems; first likely none of them can be ID’d so I waste my time going through them, and so does the next ID’er who shows up. So now it’s wasted time for multiple people.
The worst one I saw though, was in my area. Last year someone uploaded a very unusual Bombus, and several of us were discussing it. We never did nail it down exactly, but it might have been a western vagrant, it was really rather interesting. So you can imagine my annoyance and disappointment when I saw the same person uploaded the same photo this year, dated this year. Lied this year, probably lied last year. Took an interesting observation and cheapened it.
A duplicate is - the same species, from the same person, and I check the time it was observed.
“Duplicate please combine”
If there are 3 photos of An orchid and John has added a species ID to the second photo … we truly don’t want to waste skilled identifiers time on duplicates. Johns orchid next!
Many people take the same plant. That is part of how iNat works - NOT duplicates.
I have thousands of Needs ID to work thru, and clearing duplicates is ‘one of my skill level batons in the endless relay race’
Your batons may / will be different.
Maybe there ought to be some guidelines/consensus for what to do as an identifier when coming across obvious duplicates. As someone who occasionally goes through “casual” plants to put IDs on common garden plants and such, the practice of knocking duplicates into casual by marking them “no evidence of organism” just shifts the issue. Plenty of times I’ve ID’d and corrected these things just to then realize they’re duplicates of something I’ve ID’d before. I think it would be much better to add a comment saying “duplicate” ideally with a link to the first/original observation. I can then just mark it “reviewed” and move on. I realize marking things reviewed takes the duplicates only out of my personal identify queue and some folks might want a more global solution to this, but repurposing marks that are designed to be used for something else just ends up complicating things for those of us who do try to ID casual observations as well.
Are you talking about duplicates like literally the same exact photo or duplicates like 5 different observations of the same bee from slightly different angles? I feel like with the former ‘no evidence of organism’ is ok though not really what it is for but for the latter it gets harder. Can you be sure it is the same bee? Is it really against the rules to take them? I agree it’s annoying and not contributing much to the pool of knowledge. But i am not sure how long one has to wait before it’s technically against the site rules. It also seems like itw ould be boring and pointless to most observers, so maybe in some cases reaching out to them will help as they can spend that time finding other insects and plants instead. But I know that isn’t always possible. In my case I usually will just ID the duplicate unless there’s a huge number of them because it’s just as quick as anything else for me and gets them out of the way for others without possibly misusing a data flag. I tend to interpret rules pretty literally and i know some people do not but have a feeling many others in this community may do so the same as me. For example i didn’t actually know landscape photos was listed in the description of no evidence of organism and now i am bothered by that because lots of my non-blurry observations of trees are landscape photos… etc. We aren’t all good at ‘inferring the spirit of the rules’.
In 99% of cases it’s pretty easy to detect duplicates by looking at characteristics specimen has throughout each photo, as well as habitat around, if it’s a bee on one flower, then a bee on another, you can’t really tell if it’s a duplicate, though sometimes it can be suggested if it’s shown that user e.g. don’t know how to combine photos and posted everything as many observations, it can be communicated with some users, but those who already left the site can’t do anything and voting is the best option now (I tried iding other things, but other iders just straight don’t care what you write, they still id object in centre, so I stopped doing that), but if you can’t prove it’s a duplicate, then just leave it alone.
About landscape photos, if there’s actually a tree in them, that’s not the case for marking it as no evidence, but if it’s a photo of sunset or a random city photo with 90% of photo being something out of concrete, then it’s much more reasonable.
Current examples of this style can be found coming in from Hong Kong, for example. ~Three species across ~50 shots/obs is a thing for some folks. (Perhaps there is some incentivization for observation volume for some people.) At high volume the id time spent adds up.
Yup, one ant in at least 10 obs, one Vespa wasp in the same amount (and also yes, observed by many people who almost all post duplicates), a pond with fish which has some observations of its own and also inclued in “mass style” observations, it all comes down to how iOs app (and import from Seek) isn’t in its prime right now.
Huh, I hate duplicates but I never mark landscape photos as no evidence of organism. I can see the tips of some trees in that one, so I would ID it as dicots.
I don’t really think it matters. It’s a worthless obs. you cannot count some leaves that are too tiny to see and that obviously aren’t the focus of the picture as evidence of organism. As iNaturalist help files say, you should identify what the focus of the observation is - if there is a picture of an ant on an elephant’s toe, you identify the ant, not the toe.
In this case the focus is pretty clearly clouds… not an organism. Just because you can find some evidence of an organism somewhere in the picture doesn’t mean an organism was the focus.
This is even clearer to me when there is a placeholder or a comment saying “bridge” or “landscape” - clearly they didn’t have an organism in mind when they took the picture, so why should we find some lame piece of evidence for an organism and identify that? It helps no one.
I beg to differ. I think that if the focus is clearly not an organism, we should identify an organism in the photo instead. I think of it as, if no organism is identified there is no chance of the observation being scientifically useful, but if there is one there’s a small chance that it will be. A small chance is bigger than no chance, so identifying it is better - even if it’s just to “dicots” with “community taxon cannot be improved” checked. Obviously, if the focus is an organism you should identify that, but it’s better to have bad data than no data.
if there is an identifiable organism and the observation appears to be mapped correctly i don’t see any reason not to identify it. It helps researchers as much as any other observation would. Intent isn’t relevant in species presence data. There are all kinds of important pieces of evidence to help untangle past ecosystem status in old photos and even paintings. I have a print on my wall of a painting of the Shelburne area in Vermont from the 1800s. There are many huge American elm trees in the painting. Nearly all are now gone due to Dutch Elm Disease with mostly only small elms remaining. The purpose of the painting was not ‘document American Elm’ but it does a good job of illustrating a past landscape.
I’d put the painting as “human” - definitely not evidence of an elm, by iNat standards.
There is a fairly minute chance that identifying the above photo to anything worthwhile is very minimal. Is there a chance? sure. But given all the much better observations out there, our time is better spent elsewhere than fighting others for the chance to identify some blurry leaves to “Dicots”
I used to work as an archaeologist. You could very technically and literally say that any artifact could give us a bit of useful information about the society that discarded it. But is it really worth it to document every artifact, much less keep it, label it and pay for storage for it for decades to come? What about the huge quantities of our current trash - will that too become valuable information for future societies? There’s a minute chance… but not enough to make a difference. This is no different than the vast quantities of other trash we produce.
Now you have me trying to ID those clouds - Altocumulus maybe? But yeah, in this case I’d say marking it as “no evidence of organism” (maybe with a comment pointing out that iNat is for identifying living things) would be appropriate and the intended use of that flag. Where I see issues is with repurposing quality control flags willy-nilly for the mere goal of getting stuff out of the “Needs ID” queue, regardless of the intended use of that flag. That’s just sowing confusion.
The other thing I’ve seen people do in these cases is add IDs to various background objects which are obviously not what the observer intended in all but one observation, which I feel like is one of the most confusing things to do because then it either wastes peoples time by causing future IDers to put disagreements back to ‘state of matter life’ or if it does make RG with an ID that is obviously not the primary subject potentially confuses the CV in the future.
I do add IDs to background objects in things like landscape shots where there is no obvious subject because its no different from adding IDs to any low-quality picture of that subject. And if from a comment the observer’s intent clearly is a background object that would take precedence over not confusing the CV in the future.
If observer wanted to have one thing in focus, but posted in many times, there’s no reason to id this object in each observation, and iding another organism would in fact be the opposite of what you describe, it would be helpful to not waste the record and observation, iders should read descriptions and comments more, they ignore them all the time, if they weren’t, there wouldn’t be any confusion.
Typically I ID all the duplicates (by duplicates I mean a string of obs showing the same organism, using at least slightly different photos, that clearly all should have been on one observation instead of several.) In rare instances I have had other users insist I withdraw my ID (as in, the other users insist duplicates should remain “unknown”) and I have declined. I don’t know what the best solution is, but I am sure leaving things as unknown isn’t it.
The very idea of RG duplicates appalls me, so I think it’s better not to do anything that leaves them in the main Needs ID pile. Marking as no evidence of organism, marking captive/cultivated, etc, are not the right solutions, but they’re the best we have at the moment. Please don’t just treat duplicates as normal observations.
