In addition, Facebook doesn’t have the taxonomic framework that iNat has which allows you to find and organize submitted photo records.
I’ve lamented this same experience several times…usually with friends who are professional entomologists. I mention iNaturalist, and they make a pained face and say “Oh, there are soooo many wrong IDs there.” But do they know how it works? No. Do they find out how it works? No. Do they contribute their expertise to help make it better? No. And it’s amazing how often the negative opinion is based on one brief experience they had with the app when they picked it up and used it for five minutes six years ago.
Good for you for defending iNat - I try to do the same by sharing how it’s become part of my life, and how my favorite down-time activity is reviewing observations and helping improve IDs. I also encourage people who were unaware of the web interface (as I was at first, too) to try it out–it’s a much better way of interacting with the community, and once new users learn the ropes, they realize that there are people here who actually do know what they’re doing!
…and that’s no different from “real” museum collections, which often include misidentified specimens that have to be sorted out by other actual humans. And, just as an observation might go unidentified for a while, how often do we see a news story about some new species that was just described from a specimen that’s been in museum storage for [random big number] years?
So maybe that’s a parallel that would help persuade some doubters…iNat is just another big museum collection, accessible anytime by anyone and similarly in need of volunteer curators.
I have the greatest respect for iNat’s taxon specialists who are big enough to say openly - I was wrong. It makes all their IDs rise in my eyes.
(Never used the app - except for 5 minutes to see what it looks like. But it lacks a prompt to Come and Try the Website?)
Not on social media, but I assume these concerns come up there as well: I remember watching a talk once that was being given at a divers’ event, and the presenters were talking about the value of iNaturalist for science and about the process of photographing all sorts of marine animals and identifying them. Most of the presentation focused on invertebrate animals (crinoids, cnidarians, sea stars, etc), algae, etc, with of course a few mentions of fish.
The audience Q&A consisted mostly of a series of divers firmly expressing their opinion that iNaturalist seemed like a poaching tool that was leading illegal fishers straight to 2-3 species of fish of concern, and they wouldn’t touch it for that reason, and/or that the platform should be shut down to protect those fish or at least entirely remove its location tagging feature. The presenters did mention taxon obscuring and the ability of uploaders to obscure observations directly, but that didn’t seem to register.
The presenters did an admirable job at trying to remind the audience of all the species that are not those fish of concern, of pointing out that you can choose not to upload specific things if you think it’s dangerous to do so, and of the value of documenting ecosystems as a whole; but it seemed there was a serious sticking point there.
Wow! Lucky converts! I wish I had an iNat mentor as involved in my naturalizing process as you are with these nay-sayers! Of course, I am a beginner and not a knowledgable influencer, so I don’t expect that kind of mentoring and am just grateful for the time people spend when they respond to my questions on the forum.
I have only had one person tell me how horribly inaccurate iNat is and I explained the process and the method (Things get IDed when the volunteer IDers have time to get to them and 2/3s of the IDs = research grade.) I also explained how educators sometimes make it worse by requiring public school students to do IDs. I then went on to talk about how iNat is used and cited in scientific research regularly (as per the monthly updates). AND, I mentioned the research done on the accuracy of the site as a whole, AND the massive size of the site. I think he went from disgusted to doubtful, but unlike some other disagreements I could mention, the entire conversation was polite.
People are gonna people. Especially people in academia can be sometimes … too absorbed in their own importance. I am not a biologist, but I have similar experience in astronomy - I know professors who have open disdain for “amateur astronomers” and one once told my amateur astronomer friend that he will have to “forget everything if he wants to be a real astronomer”.
Meanwhile, I have been in active contact with the amateur community for 25 years now and it has been extremely fruitful - I have actually employed one amateur astronomer part-time in 2012 and he is still working for me and is an absolute cornerstone of the entire project. I guess I am doing it wrong in the eyes of some “important” people, but what do I care, it works flawlessly.
People don’t like change - and also don’t like being made less important. One key feature of iNat is that it helps democratize the access to knowledge, which some people will always take as an offense to their authority.
Wow! Thanks for all that data!
Despite not knowing any professional entymologists (I wish I did, I have so much I want to discuss!), this post speaks to me. I first picked up iNat in 2013 when I was still in middle school. At the time I wanted a place to upload my recordings of singing Orthoptera (crickets, etc.), and my favorite sound platform, Xeno-Canto, was then limited to birds at the time. I also wanted a place to discuss the IDs of mystery Orthoptera I had recorded, and iNat seemed like the best fit. So I used it for a while, and there was some good discussion, but I lamented that the Xeno-Canto forums for mystery recordings were much more active. Understandable, since Orthoptera is a niche interest, and iNat wasn’t even an app in 2013, I don’t think.
Over the years I drifted away, came back occasionally, found that the site was somewhat harder for me to use as a blind person since it was more feature-rich, and I didn’t really concern myself with it. That is until I was required to use iNat for a college course in 2020. You still couldn’t record sounds in the iOS app at that point, so I did more with Xeno-Canto instead. But still, I noted its growing prominence and my main gripe, besides a selfish wish for more vigorous discussion on my niche taxa, was accessibility.
A friend of mine then brought my focus back here and I discovered the plethora of sound observations on here now. I love looking through and identifying things for people, but because the Identify Mode and graphic search features are completely inaccessible, and because people sometimes just don’t know how to record sounds well, or don’t leave notes describing what they want identified, the process can get a bit laborious for me. My point is, these are my criticisms of iNat. Fix the inaccessible website. Let blind people take advantage of the features sighted people take for granted. Publish a tutorial for recording and describing sounds that people won’t miss when they upload. Perhaps even make it easier for people interested in certain taxa to find each other. But these are just things that can be remedied. They are not at all indictments of iNat as a platform. To be honest, I still prefer Xeno-Canto for archival purposes and (anecdotally) higher data quality, though of a more limited scope. But I view XC and iNat as serving somewhat different purposes, so this really isn’t a problem as long as we take that into account. So yes, I get very annoyed with iNat sometimes, and I can be pretty vocal about it. But I’m certainly not a naysayer.
Thanks for the laughs! Where else [other than iNat] do serious discussions come with laughs?
See this response to your remark about this on the thread about obscuration:
6 posts were merged into an existing topic: iNaturalist Still Inaccessible to Screen Reader Users
So many good comments. If I find myself in a defensive position, I try to avoid matching their dismissive-ness: good faith critics make some good points about iNat and it doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of iNaturalist to acknowledge them.
If anyone is helped by being able to share a scientific article (for example, if the person you’re talking to values the ability to back up their argument with sources and citations), I’ve been recommending this one: The data double standard by Allison Binley and Joseph Bennett. One of the arguments that those authors make is NOT that the critiques are invalid, but that they also apply to ‘professional’ biodiversity datasets.
Are those species auto-obscured yet? (assuming that the poaching concern is legitimate)
I agree with the positives you mentioned but I think you’re reframing each issue in such as way as to miss the point of his criticisms, which I think are fair, and dismissing them doesn’t feel productive to me (not sure how serious you’re being though). If I wanted to actually address them here my descriptions would be more nuanced and as a result it would have been a much longer post.
I don’t think so; they were all species of rockfish (genus Sebastes), and though I don’t remember the exact species of concern, from what I can tell most nearby observations of them have publicly visible location tags. Some of them are listed as “vulnerable” on iNat; I’m actually not sure at what level taxon obscuring kicks in automatically. Is it endangered?
That said, one issue raised was poachers being enticed by observations to travel into marine protected zones to illegally fish species that might be legal to fish outside of protected zones (subject to quotas and laws about size and such).
In my opinion, the AI is just the icing on the cake. The power of iNaturalist is the so huge number of users who every day post georeferenced observations of living beings thus contributing to their mapping all over the world. The expected mistakes made by the AI are often corrected by the experts that are part of iNat community.
So, or these criticizers are totally unaware of this or they, for some reasons, do not like the idea of mapping the world biota.
I enjoyed awarg’s post very much but I did not think that it was discounting the concerns expressed. I felt a lot of sympathy with the concerns expressed, but some of them, I felt, could be minimized with correct usage of the site and the others, which we have in common with other social media and internet use in general, are much more of a concern for other platforms.
I especially felt sad about the concern that we should be learning from field guides and being mentored by knowledgable people and clubs. I have two Master’s degrees (none in biology) and I find field guides are of very little use until you have a good idea of where to find what you are looking for in them. (I give up after about 20 to 30 minutes of paging through a field guide looking for something similar to the thing I am trying to identify.) And I have very high level reading skills. Millenials (some of whom have told me “I don’t read books”) and younger folks may have weaker reading skills. And knowledgable people are busy and not always thrilled to encounter rank amateurs; clubs are not on every corner or even in every town. This mentorship idea of education is a lovely fantasy, but very rare. Just thinking about how seldom that happens in real life makes me sad.
https://academic.oup.com/aesa/article/117/4/220/7706383
Bee study comparing traditional methods and iNat that was recently published by https://www.inaturalist.org/people/nashuagoats