Well, as someone who will photograph any and every dragonfly that holds still long enough (and quite a few that won’t), it helps me to establish a baseline for species density at a location. I could gather the same data with a tally sheet, true, but having a visual record of a species’ preferred areas helps me to get a better long-term idea of overall habitat health.
For instance, when I wrote this journal post, if I hadn’t already had a whole bunch of time-series data about what was supposed to be in this location, I wouldn’t have known just how bad the damage from the drainage project was. As it is, I even have a pretty good idea of how much of the lakeshore seed bank got scraped off. (Side note: it’s still pretty bad.)
I love this! Same here. For me, it’s kind of a daily photo journaling of what I encounter outside. The common stuff still grabs my attention and there is always the prospect of seeing something less common or completely out of the ordinary. And if I weren’t there to see the common things, I might not have seen the uncommon thing.
jnstuart
Not criticizing anyone for taking that many photos of a species and posting to iNat — you can do what you want. But just out of curiosity … why?
For the ‘why’ I need good obs of something that is easily misID’d, and more easily mis-located. It lives in a specific habitat (think creek lines), but is often mislocated perhaps 100 meters away - makes all the difference.
Yeah, dandelions were a bad example on my part. I don’t even post them any more because of the on-going lengthy debate about identifying T. officinale.
The species I would most like to have 1000 Obs of would be any Bombus species, because that is my favorite genus to actively look for.
But that’s never gonna happen (sigh…)
I feel like every time I read these Forums, I need to add more taxa to my “don’t bother observing” list. As in every taxon about which someone says, “Can’t be IDed from a photo.”
it’s true and it speaks loudly. I was just thinkin about this today, how a choice was made to adopt a litearlly unusable taxonomy on this site. It’s one of the most observed ‘species’ too. I just put them in at genus level if i’m trying to do a species list.track every plant at a site. Otherwise i also just ignore them.
The topic is not clear to me. Millions and millions of different species of Birds come every year to various wetlands of India. Just for example over One lakh Lesser Flamingos come to wetland of Mumbai every year, over One lakh Asian Openbill breed in a West Bengal Forest, Countless Grey Pelicans breed in the state of Karnataka, Andhra, Countless birds come to Rajasthan etc. I’m not all an urban person, roam about and meet them in different parts but never tried to count them in one shot, as that is beyond my capacity. Two ordinary snapshots one showing Greylag Geese (mostly) at Rajasthan, another showing Lesser Flamingos of Navi Mumbai are attached as evidence. However, I won’t post such groups in iNAT,
Vids of these beautiful creatures are available in my YouTube channel named Birdraghu (To watch or not to watch are obviously personal choice of anybody).
