Yes, if marked accurately to where and when collected (and they were collected by the observer), museum specimens are wild. If not, they are captive.
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Thank you! That might make sense. But I need to think about some of the features of such a solution before I use it. And anyway, this is not related directly to the topic of the discussion.
Perhaps some of the uncertainty in this question is really caused by what time to refer to the state of the organism. But it seems to me that all properties of the organism should be considered in the context of observation. If the observation refers to an occurrence of an organism in the wild, then the organism (in the observation) should be considered wild. In the moment of the observation, it was wild. Regardless of subsequent actions with it. Even if some of its properties are found and described later in the museum/laboratory. And even if it was done by someone other than the observer (collector). Likewise, if the observation was made in the laboratory (and attributed accordingly), the organism (in the observation) should be considered captive. Even if it was taken from the wild and later returned to its natural habitat. In the moment of the observation, it was captive.
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Here’s where I think it would be helpful to be able to mark something as “Museum Specimen” in iNaturalist, at a higher/more prominent level than an Observation Field. Annotations arose from redundant fields, so maybe the same would be appropriate for something to indicate the source of the observation.
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This part is not required by the iNat guidelines, referenced in the marked solution above by @thebeachcomber
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I mostly ignore museum specimens on iNat and think that as a general rule iNaturalist is not where this data should live. There are a bunch of specimen databases online. Those are designed for, and meet the needs of specimen-based data much better than iNaturalist. Or, at least many of them do, and for museums using poorly designed databases the best course of action is for them to move to better databases, not to try to use iNaturalist as a museum specimen database.
There’s also a good chance that museum specimen data either is, or at some point will be, on GBIF. For downstream data users, uploading it on iNaturalist as well is likely to create a record duplication problem. Duplicate records are already an issue in GBIF, but handling duplicates gets more difficult as you have more different places and different data structures across which records might be duplicated…
That said, I do have photographic observations on iNaturalist that are correlated to museum specimens. I think we could use a better way of addressing that kind of case. The photographs don’t really live well in specimen databases, the specimen doesn’t really live well in iNaturalist, but it’s not clear how one should record the fact that the two are linked…
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Should probably be made clear here … there are different types of museums and, hence, different types of museum specimens. I’ve seen a few pics of what are public-display specimens in public natural history museums which might or might not have collection data associated with them. Those should definitely end up as Casual records. But I think mostly what is being discussed here are research museum specimens which typically do have collection data associated with them. If they are your specimens, that you collected in the wild, they are fair game for submitting to iNat as your observations.
I’m less comfortable with the idea that I could go into such a museum collection and photo/upload other people’s preserved specimens as my observations. I concur with @aspidoscelis that in museums that are already putting their collection data online, you can end up with redundancies on GBIF – the museum specimen record and an iNat photo record of the same, without necessarily an easy way to connect the two as the same thing. However, if the museum specimens are a collection that has not been digitized and maybe never will be, the photo records on iNat may be useful.
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I should add that the website OdonataCentral.org for dragonfly and damselfly records does allow photos of museum specimens to be added to their photo on-line database and many of those specimens are in established university research museums. Perhaps that practice could be redundant in some cases although I don’t know if insect collections are as well digitized and as publicly-available as some other (e.g., vertebrate) collections.
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Read that post again, it specifically says your museum/herbarium specimens.
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That is definitely required by iNat.
And they still would be casual and won’t get to GBIF, it’s more useful for that collection to contact GBIF.
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Whether it’s appropriate or not, there are such museum records at RG. This one is a historical photo but same idea.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/513000
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If you reintroduce animals into a nature reserve, are they still captive?
That’s beyond the scope of this thread. The answer is “probably, but it depends”.
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I guess that “your” can be interpreted in different ways. I assumed it refers to the specimen you are observing, not that it belongs to or was collected by you.
Would be good for iNat staff to clarify what is meant by that.
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Considering that iNat is explicitly supposed to be for recording and sharing your own encounters with nature, I doubt random museum specimens are encouraged, even if they may technically be allowed (and I’m not sure that they are).
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Part of my interaction with nature is through examination of herbarium specimens. I feel OK with posting the occasional one here if I have some reason to do so, and I’d mark them wild if I included the date and place of collection, and collector’s name if not me.
However, the specimens I interact with are mostly posted on other websites, so I wouldn’t normally post them here.
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iNaturalist has a mission, and a certain set of use cases. It is not intended to be a catch-all repository for all biological data of every kind. This is one of those threads where I fail to see how the question itself fits into iNat’s purpose.
eBird serves a purpose. BugGuide serves a purpose. FishBase serves a purpose. Dave’s Garden serves a purpose. The Nudibranch Lovers thread on ScubaBoard serves a purpose. GBIF serves a purpose. And in like manner, museum databases serve a purpose.
iNaturalist might be something of a Swiss army knife or a Leatherman tool, but even these tools do not serve every purpose; you still need other tools. There are things I wouldn’t do with a Swiss army knife, no matter how versatile it is. Likewise, there are things I wouldn’t do with iNaturalist either, and the topic of this thread is one of them.
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For hard-to-ID museum specimens, I could see iNat being a convenient way to get photos of those specimens in front of multiple specialists for their opinions. Maybe not all specialists are on iNat, but you can easily point them to an URL of the record for review. Not the mission of the website and yet a useful aspect.
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Very true! It’s much easier for both me and the person I’m consulting if I post the photos as an observation on iNaturalist than if I try to e-mail multiple large files.
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And if you do that we will mark it as date incorect. iNat is not for falsifying your records, you see specimens now, not 80 years ago when they were collected, don’t lie.
That user is not a human, but centre of studies, that’s more appropriate.
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I do not view correctly recording the date and place of collection as lying. In fact, would view reporting it with the current date and place as a lie, as far as providing information about the plant’s origin goes. However, I will agree with you that there is some potential conflict here.
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