True, some might have been feral. I may have been overzealous in marking them as captive. I’ve gone back and removed the flag from one which looks feral. With some it is difficult to tell.
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The default assumption on the site is for wild, which means the vote should only be done with evidence presented it is captive or cultivated. If you suspect it, but are unsure, a comment to the user asking them to do it, if they know it is captive may be a better choice.
To follow up, I’ve sent the project admin several messages with examples, as well as directly reached out privately to around 10 users who were pressing agree on many very clearly incorrect IDs. No one has responded to any of these messages.
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I haven’t heard back from the project creator either.
Perhaps a translator would help?
Or maybe tagging people from the bioblitz?
United Arab Emirates - iNaturalist World Tour · iNaturalist.org
Flagged some pot plants as cultivated.
I also found one user who has been taking screenshots of other observations so flagged a few and then emailed help about them. They had screenshot the whole observation page in the app so it was really obvious. I can’t assume good faith since they have done this for every observation they posted, no attribution, the dates over a month out and locations from a different continent in some case. At least it was really obvious!
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Has anyone had any successful contact with any of the project admins yet? This has been the weirdest project with a lot of copyright infringement. I flag stuff that has evidence, they delete it, and then they post different images taken from the internet the next day. It seems like every day there are new observations that are cultivated plants and cats. But a lot of those turn up on reverse image search too.They rarely seem to respond to comments on observations. I have only had one person actually respond to a question/comment.
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No, the project admin has not been active since October 30th. I’m hoping they were not on the receiving end of mean or insulting messages. I’ll reach out to them again.
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Any updates on this front? I’d like to get involved with cleaning up IDs, but once the situation has calmed down. Fortunately I do have some experience with the local organisms.
I wish I knew Arabic, it might help in these situations. It’s been a goal of mine for years to reach a basic level of written and spoken Arabic… Just have to find the time somehow??
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Following up:
It seems that there are two projects that are essentially pulling from the same location. So it could be users being instructed by this other project?
Which project admins were messaged?
Project at the top of this thread with AAMP Cit Scientists:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/amps-citizen-scientists
Similar project created earlier but also still active titled EPAA Biodiversity project:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/epaa-biodiversity-project-sharjah-united-arab-emirates
It does seem that the project admins have logged back on (nov 23rd for the first one and nov 5 for the second one).
The reason I ask is because new users still show up what seems like weekly. But it seems like half of them submit images from the internet. I am able to flag those easily and then the users normally delete those. It seems now many of the new users have started using tactics that are harder to detect by using reverse image search and instead copying other users images, even really old ones.
See: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/36556950
(If it gets deleted, note that it is a duplicate image of a purple cultivated plant that was submitted by a different user in 2016 who has over 1,000 observations)
So it would be nice to get a message through to whoever is having these students upload images. The students seem to be pretty quick about taking down flagged observations (I started taking screenshots to confirm some but there are too many).
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As far as getting these observations identified, a person with the user name, aishathani, has started providing many IDs (seemingly reasonable ones, I mean, e.g. plant species that actually occur in UAE).
In a brief comment to thank this person for stepping in, I also let it be known that many observations in the category of “Captive/Cultivated” were also misidentified/unidentified and could use some attention. From the reply, I got the impression that this user uses a mobile device(?) to access iNat… unfortunately, I was unable to explain how to see the Casual observations on a mobile device. I normally access iNat on a desktop computer, and doing a test search on UAE observations just now on my iPad seems to exclude Casual observations, and I don’t know how to change that.
Perhaps if someone can help out with the technicalities, maybe this person would be willing to address some of the Casual observations too? Just a thought…
on the android version when on explore page there is a button top right with what appear three letter t’s on their side, clicking that gets you into filters where you can activate casual. I don’t have, but would assume iOS has a similar button?
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I don’t see any similar option on my iPad, after checking it out. That said, I don’t know what operating system/device this person may be using (the “app” was mentioned). You can read the brief exchange in the link I posted. Thanks.
Their own observations suggest they are using an iPhone, so someone who uses an iOS device needs to clarify if that same functionality is there.
That functionality is not available on iOS.
I messaged this person twice, but received no response. Looks like a lot of these are coming from the American University of Sharjah?
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I have definitely noticed this person. I do mass rapid IDs of Unknowns in Asia and he often follows up on them. With reasonable suggestions, as you mentioned.
Hmm, maybe? I was also able to find this project which is solely AUS based (but only one person for some reason?) Maybe she might know what directions other students are being given. It sounds like it might be a campus wide initiative based on the project description.
See: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/aus-sci-biodiversity?tab=about
I can try messaging people to, but I didn’t want to message people if several others had already reached out to them.
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