Is there a way to filter out the same animal entered by multiple users from the same location, date and time? For example: 215059847, 215165421, 215598864, 225579604; and 233998846, 233805671, 233524094, 233384547. For some species, there are 10+ records for the same animal/date/time/location. It significantly skews abundance data when a group of people photograph the same animal at the same time, and all of them enter it into the database. It seems like iNat could create an algorithm that could alert a user when a similar record has already been added by someone else, and discourage them from proceeding.
Hi, welcome to the iNat forum! An observation represents an individual’s experience documenting an organism, so there are no violations on iNaturalist with there being multiple observations of the same organism by different people. Because of that, there won’t be efforts to tell people not to make observations of the same organism.
Perhaps you can use a separate database to combine the duplicate results for your project. That way you have full control over how you want to display the information (and in case anyone deletes their account, you have a backup for your study).
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As a note, iNat data doesn’t equate to and shouldn’t be translated as abundance data. There is no standardized effort metric on iNat, and it is impossible to estimate abundance without a measure of survey effort, even in the absence of multiple observations of the same individual from the same location and time.
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None of us would claim that our observations represent abundance data.
No obs (yet) does not mean not seen, or not there.
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When this happens, the observers are most likely students who have been instructed to post to a class project, and who proceed to do so as a group on their school campus or perhaps at a local park. Any alert that iNat gave them would conflict with the assignment they’ve already been given.
Helping instructors/project administrators better prepare their students to post better (and less repetitive) observations is an ongoing concern that we have discussed many times.
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In my experience iNat helps you to get an overview for abundances for species that are rather frequently observed. And this has been very helpful to me in the past. But anyone trying to get reliable data for academic research will have to do a lot of work to achieve a significant quality.
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