City Nature Challenge 2025 ID residue

General
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CNC is hosted (but not organised) by iNat. Still the residue is a problem for (iNat and) identifiers to clear - if they are looking after their preferred taxon, or location, or taxon / location.

This year’s ‘winner’ by species was disappointing. I chose a slice where I feel I can make a difference. Using the new Disagreements filter. 2.4K done 2.7K to go. I can see lots of identifiers working with me. I have no Spanish but am starting to recognise the irate comments.

No hay enough details for a sp ID.

Not found in South America (that was where I started - you have chosen a sp from South Africa)

Some observers have been suspended, but those wrong IDs are an eternal problem for identifiers to push the CID algorithm.

Many observers have gone dormant - again - an eternal problem for identifiers to push the CID algorithm.

Not a vanilla orchid, not even AN Orchid!

I was hoping that with 2 months of hard and dedicated work by identifiers we would improve RG % - but we have moved from almost 4 heading down to 3%.

By removing a swathe of wrong (out of range) IDs we have brought the sp count down and the ‘winner’ is now in fourth place. With 69% Casual.

1 San Antonio 48% RG 9% Casual
2 Graz 59% RG ! 2% Casual ! How to CNC winner
3 Hong Kong 42% RG 19% Casual

4 Cochabamba 3% RG !! 69% Casual !!

Local projects umbrella 39% RG
13% Casual - pretty good!
Still 48% waiting in Needs ID

Note to self
10 Cape Town 45% RG 14% Casual

I give up. I withdraw. I concede defeat. We need a better way for the next CNC. Please?

I will turn my focus back to CNC Africa.

Possible solutions? (My workaround is to leave a comment for identifiers - don’t bother, they’ve left) The words I actually use - Observer has gone, dormant

For suspended users - as a courtesy to identifiers - before we waste our time and effort on a polite comment. Show us ON the obs - User is Suspended. As iNat does for - Opted Out of CID.

For observers who were only here for CNC. iNat could send an email - you have … notifications - please consider withdrawing your wrong IDs. Ever so politely, of course.

Also for observers who have gone dormant. Show us ON the obs. Last active - 6 months ago? A year ago? MANY years ago?

If it is a year since they were active, grey out their ID and do not count it in the CID algorithm (that would show the obs to taxon specialists’ filters). This would be reversed if / when they do engage with iNat again.

Ancestor Disagreements from a year ago could also not count for CID (it is A Plant is not a useful vote for ‘disagreement’ with subsequent plant IDs) For which I blame the algorithm, not the identifier.

Yes - I can see - Suspended - or last active - by - clicking - on - each - obs - and then reminding myself to Check The Profile as well. Till I recognise the offender’s name. But it is a disgruntled waste of time and effort. Where relevant, I do open each obs in search of more info from the observer.

For projects where observers and identifiers are active, Disagreements filter is a rewarding way to help.

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That is interesting Diana. I didn’t realise the observations of suspended users were still visible. I have been IDing in one city by working my way through the observations user by user. I click on the user name in the “Observers” list, which takes me to their profile. So I see that someone is suspended and never see their observations.

I’ve come close to abandoning it a few times, because it probably really is a complete waste of my time, but then I will find someone with interesting observations that aren’t just pelargoniums roses and penstemons, and that keeps me going for another day.

By IDing user by user I can see that many people have participated in the CNC for 2 or 3 years, but don’t do anything on iNat in between. So your idea of marking people as dormant would seem to apply to most of the CNC participants (in the city I’ve been working on).

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Oh, you should make a separate feature request about showing on the observations that the user is suspended! That would likely get a lot of votes and something that iNat can do.

I gave up looking at CNC long ago after getting tired of flagging hundreds upon hundreds of observations for copyright infringement

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I never thought it was possible, but we managed to break Diana. Congrats everyone.

I’d advise you to try to let go. Specially for groups or areas you are not so sure yourself. At least in south america there are some groups like moss, grasses, liverworts and fungi (on the lichen part) that we dont even know the real distribution of things. I was fixing some of these IDs myself using the Anomaly tracker but some people pointed out they might still be correct.

And as for users not coming back to fix it. That’s expected for a good % of them since they are a good slice of the cake of new users that created iNat acc for the event and decided not to come back (or just forgot about it). Some do come back in the following CNC, but not to fix IDs, just to add more blob obs.

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Remember that INat is also for those who just go out once per year (or once per life) and have fun looking and putting names on the plants and animals that surround them, whether wild or casual, and have no interest in engaging with identifiers.

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Bowed. But not broken :rofl:

@kimbrint for our local project, we have scout groups each year. With a silent gap between CNC and GSB. Repeat next year. But I fervently believe in encouraging (other people’s - I am a GINK) kids to engage with nature. Some hope for our future. Since iNat is egalitarian the high school kid and retired professor each get One ID.

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I understand why you want this. But I think if iNaturalist did that, it would have to apply to all accounts equally regardless of who they are or their reason for inactivity, and I don’t think I want that. When some large scale identifier or taxon specialist passes away, should all their IDs stop counting after a year? No.

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The person doing the suspension has to chose whether they are only suspending the account or whether they are removing content. So in some cases suspended accounts still have active IDs or DQA votes on other people’s observations (even if they were suspended for sock puppeting or something else related to IDs)

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Graz also got first place (by a long way) in the Botanical Gardens Bioblitz a few weeks ago. Their DNA must have special bases that spell out “BioBlitz”.

On a more serious note, I agree that CNC isn’t sustainable if it continues as is. Disallowing Casual-Grade observations should be the minimum requirement (and advertised, so people know not to upload too many of them).

I also think that it should be a requirement for a CNC project to have at least one curator who can act quickly against any offences (such as deliberate misIDs, copyright infringement, AI generated content etc.) by users of their project. (I know curators are already stretched thin, but quick action here seems like it takes less work overall)

This may be unpopular as fewer cities can participate, but I think it would drastically improve the experience for a big part of the active iNat users.

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This is an important feature to include in future CNCs. Would reduce some of the garbage that is submitted. Also not declaring a winner almost immediately. I’d say wait 6 months before declaring any city a winner. Or don’t declare winners at all.

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I think this stands for “Green Inclinations, No Kids”?

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I started to type a reply about the purpose of CNC being engagement rather than data quality . . . but enough digital ink has been spilled about this topic on this forum. I don’t think I can add anything to this conversation that hasn’t already been said 100 times.

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Indeed, but the real goal is engagement in/for nature, not engagement in CNC. And I just don’t think uploading your houseplant collection to iNat to make a number bigger can be counted as engaging in nature.
And as this behaviour has the potential to drive away other users or at least make the experience worse for them, I think it’s reasonable to dissuade users from engaging with iNat/CNC in this way. Even in the most urban areas there’s enough wildlife to observe.

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No, not all. I mean that one forgotten ID which is holding the obs back, so that it does not reach the relevant taxon specialist. Unless 3, or maybe 5, combine forces to bring your dragonfly / orchid to you. If two agree it is a dragonfly, should the taxon specialist not get a chance to see it - without wading thru ALL the insects? Not going to happen.

One of the South African observers I recently got to, was a Newbie. Carefully marked all his (Wild for iNat) obs Casual. They miss the CNC and the identifiers altogether. But the winner’s leaderboard could display counts only for RG - to focus observers and identifiers on conforming to iNat’s quality guidelines.
Someone … needs to check those Casual obs and make sure they should not be Wild for iNat.

Almost two thirds is still in Needs ID. Less quality in the quantity as time goes by. But still.

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I think it would be better to allow casual during the event, but then change the project to remove casual right before they tally up the winners. That way observations with mistakes like missing observation date will show up in the project. Then other users can point it out so the observer can fix it. Also any that were mistakenly (or maliciously) marked at captive don’t just disappear from the project and can be fixed by other users.

Edit to add:
Seems Diana thought of the same thing

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I know what you mean and I am saying something different than what you mean. I am saying that if anyone is going to get their IDs withdrawn after a year of account inactivity then everyone must get their IDs withdrawn after a year of account inactivity, both for fairness and because who is going to sit and cast judgement on each account as to whether their IDs “should” count or not? All users being equal is a key tenet of iNaturalist. We can’t go adding an asterisk that says “except users who signed up during CNC.”

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The latest example. Trapped at angiosperm.
First ID for luffa is wrong.
Second ID hard disagrees back to plant Kingdom - if that is going to be counted as Ancestor Disagreement - it should be greyed out and not count.
Two who agree at Dioscorea trifida do not by merely human logic - disagree with plants, and vice versa. That CID algorithm is weird, and passing strange.
And iNat says we need 3 more identifiers. Sigh.

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It really is unfortunate that a 4-day event can create such a big long-term mess. A good idea ruined by sloppy, ignorant, or bad-intentioned participants. That has soured me on the whole idea of a CNC. Either implement stricter rules regarding what records count and don’t count and provide a much longer period for review of the submissions or abandon the whole thing.

Kudos to those who have devoted so much time and effort to trying to clean up the mess. I don’t have the time or dedication or patience to do the same.

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I have been working on the copyright violations primarily, but also doing some IDs.
I’m working on a larger summary I will post eventual (probably as its own thread) but a few findings of note:

  • There is a massive amount of observation date fraud - photos which were taken by the user, but at other times and places, and posted with false dates and locations in order to include them in CNC.

I’ve found around a hundred accounts which have done this, plus many more I suspect of doing this but cannot prove because they were clever enough to strip the metadata off their photos before uploading.

The scale is simply ridiculous:
La Paz “won” the number of observations, with 148,865 observations, 4,721 species

  • The number of observations has since increased to 149,487, but total species have decreased to 3,498.
  • If you exclude casual observations (captive, flagged for copyright, DQA marked, etc) it becomes 77,034 observations and only 2,737 species. (Which is still higher than it should be).

Cochabamba “won” on species, 109,423 observations, 7,134 species

  • The number of observations has since increased to 110,831, but species have decreased to 4,967
  • Excluding casual observations makes it 34,846 observations, 3,160 species. Which, again, is still too high, since there are still a ton of falsified observations.
  • Of these remaining 34,846 verifiable observations, 9,539 belong to users who have falsified one or more other observations, and are therefore quite suspect

And then there’s Eluru India - a small project with 25,807 observations by 193 observers.
Of those, I was able to find 51 users who did NOT have obviously falsified observations. These users contributed 3,116 observations - all the rest are very likely to be fake.

And another issue: users are STILL UPLOADING false observations tailored to be included in these projects, even though the contest is long finished.

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I am extremely disappointed that CNC projects are still allowed to include observations that have been tagged with a DQA vote that indicates that the observation does not qualify, such as wrong date or locality.

This is low-hanging fruit.

I’ve personally given up working on any CNC content until the right rules, tools and functionality are in place. It’s not good for my mental health to feel like I’m making no progress in a sea of fraud.

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