Hello everyone,
I’m new to the community, and I’m currently running a research project in Australia where I work with aged-care residents to explore the plants, animals, and insects within the aged-care garden.
I’ve just created a collection project on iNaturalist（ https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mlh-outdoor-discoveries ), but I’m a bit confused about how observations are being displayed. At the moment, the project shows many observations from the entire surrounding area.
I assume this is because I haven’t set a specific boundary for the aged-care garden.
However, I found that I’m unable to add the location of the aged-care facility as a “Place.” From the tutorials, it seems that users need at least 50 submitted observations before being allowed to create a new Place. I’ve already made more than 50 observations, but the option to create a Place still isn’t available.
I’d really appreciate advice from the community:
Do I need to create a custom Place boundary for the aged-care garden in order for the project to only display observations from that location?
If so, is there something else I need to do before I am allowed to create a Place?
Any tips on how to set up a project properly for a specific outdoor area would be very helpful.
In addition to what @yongestation said, keep in mind that if the area is really small collection projects can miss a lot of observations.
If the observation accuracy circle doesn’t completely fit within the collection area the observation won’t be included, so places that are on the scale of a backyard, a garden, a city block, etc often fail to capture many, if not most, of the observations taken within the place.
A traditional project may be better, but it requires more work as you have to manually add observations.
You should try to find plants and animals in the wild, plants that were deliberately grown by humans do not count toward your verifiable total. Birds and insects are a good bet, and if there is any patch of wilderness near you the plants there would likely count (whereas plants in peoples gardens or planted in flowerbeds in urban parks wouldn’t). You can read more about what counts as captive or cultivated here:
I am curious about how the system determines whether the plants I photographed are captive or cultivated. Is the system automatically recognized, or do people recognize me?
A mixture of both. Many are manually marked by users who see your observation, though the hope is that you yourself would mark any observations of cultivated plants as such! You know best after all, and it is important for this information to be recorded correctly as iNaturalist data is used for quite a bit of research and cultivated plants and captive animals should not be used to inform e.g. range maps. Some are automatically flagged as captive if a sufficiently high proportion of nearby observations of that taxon are captive (e.g. if I upload an observation of a dog, it will by default be marked as captive since most of the dog observations near me are of pets).
I’m afraid you have fewer verifiable observations now, because I just went through them and most were obvious cultivated plants, growing in pots on the shelves of a nursery or Bunnings. Sorry to be mean!
If you are restricted to looking at gardens, concentrate on the weeds, and look for insects - bees, butterflies, hoverflies and others abound in gardens at this time of the year.
Added:
Another alternative is to use a place that already exists. For example this one:
@Xingting_iNature , I hope you’re not discouraged by the comments which all appear meant to help you in your goal. In several ways they illustrate why it’s important for project creators to get experience with iNaturalist before launching a project. Your idea for the aged-care residents is really nice. As you’re learning, iNaturalist projects are best geared to non-cultivated observations. In a garden, the conspicuous species are going to be cultivated, but all the pollinators, “weeds” and “pests” are fair game for observations and can show your residents an amazing array of life they can learn to appreciate. Best wishes for success with the project! If you need help delineating the place when you get your 50 verifiables, come back and we can help.
So many thanks @janetwright. I will try to get 50 verifiable plants as soon as possible, and once I have questions, I will approach you here. Thanks to all the lovely people here.
If it has the green banner with two people and a check mark, it’s Research Grade, and if it has the white banner with one person and one outlined person and a plus sign, it’s Needs ID. Both of those categories are Verifiable and count toward the 50 needed. If it has a white banner with one person and a rounded edge, then it’s Casual and won’t count toward the 50.
just a heads up, most of the plants you photographed and uploaded today are also cultivated, and thus are non-verifiable. If a plant is growing in a garden bed, then in most cases it will have been planted there. Try to have a look in some more natural areas if possible, or look for weeds growing in gutters, cracks in the pavements, etc if you’re limited to strongly urban areas. If you can find some lawn or a nearby park, it should be pretty easy to find a lot of weed species growing there (think of things like dandelions, clovers, etc)
