One of the other users was jennybklyn. Interestingly, I see the observations she made before and after the event, but not the observation of the swallowtail butterfly she saw during the BioBlitz on Saturday.
One of the challenges I ran into was that everyone else at the BioBlitz was an iPhone user, while I have been using the Android app for years. It looked like they were uploading their observations, and had accounts, and that’s certainly how they described what they were doing.
Can someone please help me try to figure out this mystery?
The project settings look correct and the place works as well. Can you find a specific observation that was meant to be included in the project? I also do not see the butterfly observation which means that either she didn’t upload it or something went wrong during the upload. Maybe the observations themselves got saved, but not yet uploaded (happens a lot on the new iOS app and there is a setting that lets you specifically do that, so maybe that happened)?
Difficult to say what exactly happened, without knowing more…
Thank you so much for everyone’s responses. The problem is that I don’t even see the other people’s observations on iNat, although I saw them on people’s phones. How can I learn what needs to happen to get things uploaded? The people I was working with were pressing the “Upload” button and saying that they were “uploading observations”. What is the longest amount of time that it takes to get observations uploaded with the new iPhone app? Thank you!
The reason Jenny’s Swallowtail observation is not in the project is that it has an accuracy circle of 54 metres. That means that part of the circle is outside the area of the bioblitz; looking at it on the map it extends into the properties on Decatur St.
For any observation to be included in the project, the whole of their accuracy circle has to be inside the area of the project. As the project area is long and narrow, the size of people’s accuracy circles is critical to getting their observations to appear in the project. Anything centred in a backyard, for example, is going to need a very small circle to ensure that it doesn’t extend beyond the project edge.
I had a similar problem on a bioblitz in a small area and the problem was exactly as described in Vireya’s post. You can see the radius as a red circle when you view the observation and look at the map of the location. You can instruct people to edit their observation(s) and shrink the circle, which, in my case, would never have worked because the participants were not tech savvy. Instead, I expanded the bioblitz area beyond the actual boundaries. I couldn’t figure out how to edit the place, so I made a new place that was larger and included it in the project.
@bianavarga an alternative set-up is that instead of using a place requirement, you could instead use date, time, and users/project members only. Do you have a list of users who attended? Then you’d capture all observations made by a set of users during the time of the bioblitz, regardless of place. That will capture observations made near the edges.
FYI - To edit your existing place, if you go to the place page (eg. go to Places in the top of page menu bar, then search for the name of your place and click on the link to it), just under the map on the right edge of the page is an “Edit Place” link.
Thanks! I tried it on one of my places, and it was simple to edit. I tried it on the previous place I mentioned regarding the bioblitz, and it still doesn’t give me the edit option. Maybe a quirk for that particular place. https://www.inaturalist.org/places/lsu-hilltop-arboretum
Wow – I can’t believe how much help I’m getting here! I expanded my place and Jenny’s swallowtail observation is now a part of my BioBlitz. She told me that she had to add a location to her observation for it to show up & Alison Young at iNat told me that users have to give the app permission to access their location, otherwise it doesn’t automatically populate. I am guessing that the users at my BioBlitz who downloaded the app for the first time just didn’t set up the permissions correctly. Definitely something to keep in mind for next time. I think I am just going to ask folks to send me their pics & I will upload them myself.
Except that conflicts with copyright. Not ‘your’ pictures of your engagement with nature.
It only ‘conflicts with copyright’ if the person who took the photo(s) doesn’t expressly give bianavarga permission to use it / them. If they do (which they imply by stating they will “ask”) then no copyright problem.
The point of it being “Not ‘your’ pictures of your engagement with nature” is a can of worms for other threads to discuss at length, but it is entirely down to how an individual wants to use the app. There is no requirement that everything you upload can only be images you took yourself (you just have to have permission from the person who took them).
An alternative to giving the app permission for your location is most newer smart phones will write the GPS location detail into the metadata (along with a date time stamp) of the image. If you then upload the image to the iNaturalist app it pulls the location from the file and the app does not need permissions for your location.
Um, there sort of is, actually. The basic principle of an iNat observation is that observations are meant to represent your personal encounter with an organism. This means that in most cases you will also be the person who took the photos.
E.g., from the help pages (my emphasis):
Photos or sounds attached to observations should include evidence of the actual organism at the time of the observation, observed by the user who is uploading the observation.
Everything in the site guidance discourages users from regularly posting observations that are not their own, even with permission (there are a few exceptions, such as shared accounts, but the assumption is that all people whose content will be posted should have some level of control over the activities of that account and their content).
Note also that even if you get permission to upload someone else’s photo, and even if that person is credited in the observation notes, within iNat’s system the observation and photo will be attributed to you as the account holder.
Fair comment and I see where you’re coming from but I don’t consider that as a requirement, rather guidance / suggested use. Most people (myself included) won’t end up digging through help pages to find that guidance. If you download the app and just start using it to make observations there is nothing to indicate in the upload process that it must (or even should) be your own personal image.
I think its far more useful / important to have the observations recorded (to share what’s out there) than worrying about who specifically saw it. Just my point of view though (not necessarily right), sure others will have a different opinion, which is fine.
If one uses “useful” as a primary criterion to determine whether something should be uploaded, where do you draw the line? Is anything fine, no matter where I got the photo, provided I have permission from the person who took it? Should I go about reposting random Facebook and Instagram content if the photographer says it is OK, according to the argument that iNat users can help ID it and it is a potentially useful data point? This hardly seems desirable.
Staff have made very clear on other occasions when the question has arisen in the forum that posting second-hand observations of organisms that you did not personally see should be the exception rather than the rule.
One of the issues that can come up when people post photos they did not take themselves is that it becomes more difficult or even impossible to verify the circumstances of the find – they cannot provide additional information about the habitat; if something seems odd they may not be able to provide more information that would help to resolve any questions; they cannot confirm the place and date of the observation. Indeed, I have seen at least one case where someone had posted a photo taken by a family member and made incorrect assumptions about when the photo was taken, resulting in a wildly out-of-range record because, as the subsequent discussion revealed, it was likely taken on a trip on another continent. There is already ample room for mistakes when posting observations of organisms I saw myself – but all of these potential sources of error are multiplied many times if it is an organism I did not see and I am relying solely on information from someone else. And observations made from my account will be posted in my name, meaning that I am, in effect, taking responsibility for the correctness of the data.
It would not seem advisable to take on this responsibility for participants in a bioblitz unless I had been there with them and saw the organism myself. Another consideration is that if the point of the bioblitz is to get people engaged with nature, and if the point of using iNat is to help them do this, then uploading their photos to someone else’s account deprives them of a portion of the experience – they won’t have a list of species they have seen that they can refer to, they won’t get feedback from the community, they won’t be empowered to continue making observations and documenting biodiversity in the future once the bioblitz is over. So it seems like a better course of action would surely be to help them sort out whatever challenges they are having with the app, which would be more rewarding in the long-term both for them and the people running the bioblitz.
