Create a tutorial and/or Code of Conduct on ethics of exploring wild places for iNaturalist users

I think an easy one to envision is if someone has a question or there is an issue that becomes apparent, it would be easy to post a link to a Best Practices document to give them more info or a well-written carefully considered piece which can be hard to do on the fly in comments. It doesn’t have to be sought out to be useful, but can also support others in communicating.

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Welcome to the Forum, @tuckerm :)

iNat is a learning curve, and how to iNat responsibly, could, and should be part of the curve.

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@earthknight Sorry… I think I misdirected my thoughts. I was reacting (perhaps overreacting) to this part of the OP

Yes, that would be good. But so much more basic instruction to new users, especially, would be very good.

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I have the same concern. The OP mentioned the impacts of peeling bark, picking flowers, and handling animals; but then someone else could come along and add, say, walking (can leave a trace). Or holding a conversation where wildlife who fear humans can hear it. One could present evidence of an impact of these activities. I wonder if there are any studies on how wildlife with a keen sense of smell react to being downwind of a human – even a clean human?

For those who can appreciate the cultural reference: Fire Marshall Bill is never far away.

Interesting question. I found a blog posting about this:
http://www.wildlifebiology.org/blog/how-mask-human-scent

It makes sense that the scent of a potentially dangerous situation would lead animals to avoid or abandon an area. And, with loss of habitat that impact could be significant in some areas these days.

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I also agree. I wonder if making videos showing these principles would be a better way to demonstrate these principles in the “wild.”

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I’d be a strong advocate of an effort in this direction. I’ve noticed that some iNaturalist users come from communities that already have a “leave no trace” ethic. Within those communities, it is a matter of practice to promote the community’s principles, and at least some learn to adhere because they trust the community. But iNat itself has no ethic as such, so when such principles are shared with other iNat users, they seem to be rejected by anyone who isn’t already following them.

I would appreciate some effort to create a community ethic of respect for individuals and habitats, and guidelines around what that looks like. How to become a community that can spread such an ethic effectively is, of course, the tough part.

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The philosopher of ethics and biology Dr. Aleta Quinn included the following passage in a recent paper:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368120301941?dgcid=author

The core concern of the herping community is that stable populations of herps have access to quality habitat. In the preceding section I mentioned some philosophical concerns about what constitutes quality habitat, related to concerns about naturalness. From the herper’s perspective, quality habitat is simply the conditions that enable individual herps and herp populations to successfully occupy and thrive in an area over time.

The ‘‘first rule’’ of herping—the thing first taught to folks with any casual interest in seeing a salamander or finding a snake—is to return everything just as you found it. When a newcomer asks for advice on how to find herps, the basic pragmatic advice is to look under logs and stones (that’s where the herps are). This search procedure is called flipping. The herping community will also meet the newcomer’s request with an injunction to put the logs and stones back to the way that she found them.

The first rule is a distillation of the broader principle not to degrade habitat uneccessarily. Substantive knowledge is needed to apply the simple concept of quality habitat as conditions that enable herps to succeed. A reasonable first step is to enjoin beginners to, first, do no harm. As will be explored throughout this section, it isn’t really possible to visit a site without leaving any trace at all, but the first rule conveys the goal of minimizing harm to the extent humanly possible. If you are doing it right, my first herp teacher said, then no one could tell that you were there at all. The salamanders, of course, can tell (whether they were present when I flipped a log over, or came to the site after I had put the log back to the best of my human abilities). But it is often humanly possible to herp in such a way that no human could tell you had been there, and that is a condition of what constitutes successful herping.

Finding cover objects that have been flipped and not been put back, or even been attempted to put back, is a source of anger in the herping community. The anger derives from knowledge that messing up just one log may be destroying a substantial portion of multiple animals’ universe. The anger also derives from betrayal of the community of herpers. Very few members of the general public know (or care) that to find salamanders, one needs to flip logs. For someone to know this connection, that person must have learned from someone in the herp community. Very, very few people flip logs for no reason at all. Thus, when one finds a log that has been flipped and not put back, the most likely explanation is that someone else flipped that log looking for herps (or insects), and didn’t put it back. That suggests that the person learned enough from the herp community to know how to begin to look for salamanders, but the person learned none of the responsibilities that attach to herping.

The anger thus reflects both direct dismay at the prospects of individual organisms (which the herper may well have seen and photographed on previous occasions), and anger about decay of the effectiveness of the system of respectful herping. The concern for sustainability and the ethos of the herping community is exemplified by the following passage from a field guide, which prioritizes habitat preservation over the fate of individual animals:

As nearly as possible, leave the habitat as you found it. Put back into its original location each rock, log board, etc., that you moved. They offer shelter not only to amphibians and reptiles but to a host of other important organisms. Do not tear apart decomposing logs with abandon or strip them of bark or moss, especially in areas used by the public.

There’s a lot of other good stuff in the paper but I thought that was a decent example of how a “code” had been adopted by one group of naturalists.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368120301941?dgcid=author

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I will only rarely turn over a a log, because I am so worried about putting it back so as to avoid squashing anything. Squeamish.

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The part about putting logs and rocks back is a good place to start. However, it did start a train of thought for me. Litter, such as discarded cans and bottles, can be used by small critters as shelters. Should such litter be left in place so as not to deprive those critters of their hiding places, or does the benefit of removing litter outweigh this?

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Um, I see your point; but I am strongly in favor of removing it.

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It is a good idea, but maybe should be called a “recommended best practices for ethical nature observing,” or some such. In other words, is the term code the best in this case.

I’m a big time Leave No Trace follower because conservation of wild places and creatures is my number one issue. I’ve done plenty of volunteer trail work and trash cleaning in the forest, and the number one issue I see in Wilderness is people not packing out their TP, followed by having illegal fires, followed by leaning trash… I don’t see too much hurting of trees and other organisms, fortunately.

I guess I can’t assume all users of this site know Wilderness ethics and how to leave no trace while engaged in observing and photographing nature. I guess I can’t assume we all follow the rules, and don’t throw any food scraps aside while hiking.

Throwing apple cores, orange peels, pistachio nuts, or any other food into the wild places or out of a vehicle is very bad for mammals. I’ve been told the food scraps could have a bacteria that then can infect the food store of the animal, and wipe out their Winter cache.

So, yeah not iNat job to police but maybe some responsibility to educate about ethics when observing.

So, maybe start with some url links to LNT and stuff?

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Because things like cans and bottles and plastic litter can’t be tunneled through, can’t be rooted into, don’t break down into humus, don’t provide a food source, and in many cases includes toxins or can harm plants and animals in other ways, I think they usually do more harm than good. I can think of some exceptions (especially where artificial structures are placed explicitly to increase habitat area in places which are missing some essential component), but those who are well familiar with their own local ecologies should be able to tell most of the time which category the litter they see falls into.

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I think you accidentally flipped these?

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Yes, thanks!

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It looks like the discussion has started, but how does a discussion get to a place where it can be voted on? Is there a set of criteria to determine this?

It sounds like you had a discussion with moderators and staff, but moving the discussion to general precluded a chance to vote on whether we’d want to adopt a code of ethics, tutorial, guide, or some combination thereof as a feature to the site/app.

My original intent was to see if this could get voted on for further actions, and I appreciate the discussion, but how does a discussion move forward to a feature request?

Sorry if I’m not understanding the mechanics of things work here, but the process of using forums currently feels a bit opaque to me.

I may have missed some obvious FAQ or tutorial on how to navigate the iNat Forums and what the overall process/system or criteria of decision-making is.

Could you point me in the direction of any resources on this, or is it more of a learn-as-you-go process?

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Hi yerbasanta, I think it’s a great idea to have some information for newbies. I know for myself it took me a while to learn how to handle/not handle nature, and I was surprised about some of the legal/ethical issues that come up. I can guarantee that there would be many other well-meaning people like me who have no idea how to approach some things, and would love some guidance in that area.

I have some suggestions about how to get something like what you want up and running, and how to work with the forum features. It might not be quite what you had in mind, but I think it could work well.

Firstly, there is still a lot of debate about having any kind of ‘pressure’ to conform to a list of rules, whereas I think most people agree that having education/information accessible is likely to be a good thing. For this reason, I think that the moderators would not like the idea of having an ‘official’ list of best practices, and it would take months of debate to decide what goes into it.

And I think the objection to having this discussion in the ‘features’ thread is probably because at the moment it is a fairly general idea that would still require a lot of debate/discussion to get it to a working format. My understanding of the features threads is that it needs to be something relatively concrete that they can simply add to a list of design requests once it gets enough votes. I could be wrong…

On the other hand, anyone can start a discussion about it, as you have, and I would recommend maybe using a stepped approach to this, which would be a useful learning curve, and would also eventually get you what you want.

  1. Simply start a discussion thread where you ask people to share links to information they have found about ethical handling in their field.
  2. Eventually, the discussion has lots of useful information in it, and it can be used as a link/reference in its own right. Or… it can then be turned into a wiki instead. You don’t literally turn the discussion into a wiki, but you start a new wiki, and use a lot of the info from the discussion to populate it. Using a wiki also allows people to keep adding to it in a more logical structure, instead of having to sift through long discussions to find what you want. The reason I suggest starting a discussion first is that you need to get a feel for what people want/need, and develop a ‘sense’ of how the forums work, and you also need to be a ‘mature’ user (can’t think of the right term) before the forum will allow you to create a wiki.
  3. Once the wiki is working well and is a useful source, then you could suggest in the features thread that a link to the wiki could be added to the FAQ page. Voila!

Side note on how to use the forums effectively: I totally agree that it’s difficult to find resources about how to do this. However, that’s not unusual for a public forum with mostly volunteer moderators. I think it is more of a learn-as-you-go process, because even if there is a list of guidelines, it still take a while for you to get a feel for the culture, and the culture might be different in different parts of the forum as well. For example, most discussions I’ve read have been very open and welcoming, but occasionally when you get to a specific topic, you can get some hot debate or condescending attitudes. It’s rare though.

Definitely a bit more information about how the ‘Features’ thread works would be nice. Perhaps we could suggest that in the Features thread! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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I think the answer to that question is that a discussion can become a hot topic, with lots of likes and comments and shares, and eventually that makes it popular, and gets the idea more refined. The idea probably then becomes something workable that could then be suggested on the features thread, and is likely to get votes because it’s already something that users have been thinking and talking about.

On the subject of how to use the forums, I just stumbled across this post in another thread. @twainwright found some Forum FAQ links, mentioned in this post: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/forum-faq-missing/11022/6?u=row_nature

If you were going to create a wiki, I would suggest trying to keep it quite brief and succinct, with links to external content. For example, this is a great article, but the core message might be something like: Put rocks and logs back where you found them. Leave the site exactly as you found it.

  • You could include some ethics about the wiki itself first, like not using it to shame others, and that it is there to encourage education and respect for nature, not as a list of rules.
  • Then you could have some general guidelines at the top (“leave no trace, take only photos”, try not to disturb wildlife when you are taking photos, do not remove plants from the ground unless it is definitely a weed, etc - the most common/obvious/general advice that it’s important to get across)
  • And then some specific ones in headings like: Birds, Reptiles, Fish, Amphibians etc.

My suggestions here are not about specific content to include or how to word it, but rather how to structure a suggested wiki in a way that fits the purpose, and hopefully that doesn’t cause friction.

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Totally agree with your rant! Even on the forums, there isn’t a lot of guidance about where is a good place to start. They do a good job with the bot that teaches you how to use the forum, but I think they need a bit of a tutorial about some of the different forum options and where to find help. It was hard to get started and hard to even find the FAQ page, let alone knowing that it existed.

I think adding a link in the app to the iNat FAQ page is definitely worth following up! That should be a feature request. Are you happy to add that yourself?

Sorry for getting off-topic, I just wanted to make sure this point gets followed up separately.

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