City Nature Challenge 2025 ID residue

Do you have any suggestions other than those previously mentioned (excluding casual observations from the count, waiting longer before finalizing the numbers)?

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I’d like to see potential local organizers have to meet these standards:

  • Must have joined iNat at least 6 months before signing up as an organizer
  • Must have contributed at least 100 Research Grade observations, where those observations have been checked by the global organizers or their designated identifiers
  • Must have made at least 300 identifications (and if I could think of a way to ensure those IDs are worthwhile, I’d add that)

I think the global organizers should produce information that explains in detail what constitutes a Casual observation (because no one is born knowing that street trees are not wild, for example).

I think the global organizers should disqualify cities and regions from future CNCs where the results of past CNCs (including this year’s!) demonstrate the likelihood that the majority of participants are just doing everything possible to win and to hell with appreciating biodiversity. Maybe, if I were feeling kindly, I’d allow such cities and regions to rejoin in three years if they demonstrate remorse and show plans for improvement.. Maybe not, too.

I actually adore the CNC, as a participant. I get to spend four days doing nothing but looking at the living wonders of the natural world? Hell, yes, sign me up. But as an identifier, even as an obsessive identifier, it’s not that much fun any more.

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Yes, here:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/thanks-and-appreciation-for-the-tireless-flaggers/64533/44

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In addition, I think we need the ability to tag, and consider the removal of particularly egregious projects.

If you don’t abide by the rules, your project is removed.

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Those are all reasons why the solution needs to come from iNat itself. iNat needs to protect its data quality (and the iNatters who are trying to do the work obs by obs, ID by ID, DQA by DQA)
@tiwane we have a huge problem to deal with.
I am happy to help and support newbies, but not to be tricked into supporting garbage.

Move the Challenge part to Seek (which has badges already they say) - and keep the low quality off iNat.

Onboarding to iNat. BEFORE you can upload obs should be a low barrier. Interactive tutorial - Life (no people, cats or dogs)? Wild? Media included? Picture in focus and cropped. MORE pictures for that obs? Date (correct!) ? Location (also correct!)? Is this YOUR picture? Follow your notifications - not just for these few days!
Joke or deliberately wrong ID? - final warning. Bye.

I will bear @graysquirrel 's warnings in mind when we go into the Great Southern Bioblitz - which is not as big. And I (naively) hope not as faked.

A collection project for CNC25 organisers. Then we have them together and we and they can help each other improve the quality of the sample obs. See here, this is how to iNat. And a new project for CNC26 organisers as they sign up - hello? Where are your obs? And your IDs?? Please sort the remaining issues from your previous years.

Also - the previous winners are excluded from ‘winning’. All welcome to enter - but enjoyed when we had a different winner each year with a story to tell. Cape Town won the first time we entered - we are out. La Paz won - has huge biodiversity due to varying altitude. Hong Kong won (had no idea there was so much green behind the tower blocks) Learning about biodiversity in a new place each year would be a goal for iNatters to enjoy - and gives others a chance to ‘win’. Now we are in an unappealing Go BIG or go home.

Bottom line. iNat needs to encourage identifying and provide us with more and better tools. Data from 2008 to 2021 (would love an update) 25% of IDs by 130 burnt out users

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Detect people who signed up just for CNC or have done so in the past and only contributed to CNCs. Collect their data, show it to them and other such CNC-flagged observers as usual, so that everyone feels properly engaged with and included. Hide this data from everyone else :) Problem solved, everyone’s happy.

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Diana, I think it’s a great idea for the global CNC organizers to give feedback to the local organizers before the next CNC. Maybe not every local project needs individual feedback, but if there are more than, say, 10% Casual observations six months after a CNC, those projects get a strongly worded email: “Shape up, this is not a game, people.” If the local organizers contribute fewer than 100 IDs themselves, they can get a different email: “Hey, we could really use your help!” The global organizers communicate via email, not iNat messages. iNat messages to local organizers of “bad” projects are likely to be ignored.

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Currently 13,31 % of the observations of CNC 2025 are not verifiable (casual) and this number still keeps increasing (maybe to even half a million observations soon ?!). This is insane.

Maybe next year:

  • stimulate research grade observations by only count them in project boards.
  • stimulate good pictures by combining the event with a photo competition.
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But also for last year’s observers - who have a swathe of ‘broken’ obs.
iNat could send both email (I don’t read mine) and PM.

Please review your CNC25 obs LINK
before we let you add more for CNC26.

iNat could do a practice run for the smaller GSB cohort (observers and organisers) - which is coming up 24-27 October
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2025-umbrella?tab=about

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There is also this thread where there are a lot of good suggestions for how to fix some of the current issues that lead to CNC being a major problem for IDers and other iNat users:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/city-nature-challenge-issues-suggestions-for-improvement/65039

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Also this thread from one of this year’s organisers
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-can-local-organizers-make-the-cnc-better/65008

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Pardon my cluelessness, but I’m just now looking at the Cochabamba CNC observations (specifically for spiders). It looks like a large percentage of them are duplicates - the same image posted by different accounts (often with different locations). What is going on here and what can I do to help clean it up?

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Not an expert by all means, but I’ve been doing what I could with the birds under that “disagreements” link you put Diana, thanks for that.

One thing that I tried to do at the start as I am a native spanish speaker was to try to track down the actual teachers and send them a message to get them to know the issues their kids were causing, but it was harder than I though to find the teachers behind the kids.
I can see this is one of the worst offenders in terms of projects (It even appears as “flagged”, not sure what does that imply), and the creators are a Bolivian man with no profile description, and a person from USA whose profile indicates she coordinates events such as the CNC.

It may be worth contacting her as a means to reach the teachers and other Bolivian coordinators that got the kids there, as a means of:

a) Make them be accountable to get all of those kids (at least the ones whose accounts weren’t suspended yet…) to log in and fix their mess and
b) Get them to take responsibility and avoid this happening next year, instead of spending all year building tools to deal with it “inevitably” happening.

Someone is bringing these kids here to submit a bunch of observations for a test score. Presumably that someone does not intend to cause the issues that have been caused. More than likely that someone has no idea about the whole mess.

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Zygy, I read your comment after I posted mine. To get you up to speed - During the last CNC a lot of teachers made school projects where their kids were supposed to make Inat accounts and upload observations.
They did very little (or no) effort to make sure the observations kept any quality and presumably the kids had to reach some target or quota, which in essence caused a massive flood of duplicate/fraudulent observations, “legit” observations where the user just picked the first thing CV threw in with just the picture, sock puppets, joke observations and general bad stuff.

That Bolivian city was the worst offender in this sense and to this day there’s still a massive backlog of bad observations and, since there are very few legit Bolivian users, people from all over have been pitching in with the cleanup.

Some things you can do:
Support IDs from other users to the level you are confident to take things out of whatever outlandish african species the observer picked (Going into a kingdom taxa then checking the species found around there can help a lot), flag every picture taken from the internet for copyright, vote for inaccurate location/date in any duplicate, add a note to your ID mentioning that the user is suspended if you notice that, check the wasteland of Casual observations from the area and date range to remove/push back clearly wrong IDs

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Thanks for the info! It seems like the most common problem I’m seeing is duplicate observations (as I mentioned). I have curator permissions, but I’m not sure how to properly handle these. First, how do I determine which observation is legit and which is the duplicate? Should I just assume the earliest one is the original? What do I do about the duplicate? Do I mark the image as a copyright violation and then mark the observation as no evidence of organism? Just wondering what the best practice is. If I notice an account that has lots of duplicates, should I go ahead and suspend it?

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That’s the problem: CNC is gamification. Collection Projects encourage competitive comparison. Even within single Projects it can be an issue.

Class assignment projects have the same issue. This is covered in depth in the Educator’s Guide.

I’ve been a local organizer (“Brooklyn Borough Captain”) in NYC’s CNC for six years. We have a lot of discussions about problematic observations, and users, including institutions and organizations that should be acting professionally.

Personally, I think casual observations should be excluded from CNC. That doesn’t address the effort/labor still imposed on those of us who care about real, actual observations from outright fraud and deception. If it’s perceived as a game, with rules, some folks will always be motivated to see what they can do to get around those rules. They see only the game, not the damage done.

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That is why iNat admin needs to step in - to help prevent, or resolve SO many problems.

I do not know what guidelines are for Curators - but frankly. Suspending the user - so I have click thru and find a blank screen for where and who they are, no access to their other broken obs and IDs. That rewards bad behaviour - when I come across their obs or ID it looks ‘fine no problems’. The identifier is the one who is punished and has to work so much harder.

Seen that picture before. Twice. Who does it belong to … so much pointless waste of time and effort. If iNat would show us - on every obs or ID - User Suspended - that would punish the offender and warn the identifier. Or else hide all their obs and IDs. There is one suspended woman with almost 2K UNhidden obs!

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If you have IDed one obs too many for a … Suspended User.
Please vote here.
Thanks @zygy

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/observations-by-suspended-users-should-indicate-the-user-is-suspended/67360

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Just fyi, she is one of the global organizers for CNC, based in LA. I’m not certain how “hands on” she is with that particular project.

There was discussion during the CNC organizer wrap-up meeting last month on the data quality issues, so global organizers are aware. It’s not clear yet though which solutions will be implemented from that end.

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The opinions of many iNatters have been expressed about how the CNC needs to be changed to deal with the flood of bad records generated each year. I hope iNat staff also weighs in on this given they are administering the platform that the CNC uses and abuses.

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