I’m interested in/curious about historical observations. I see observations on iNat dating back to the 1920s – usually modern photos of preserved specimens – long-ago-collected samples, beetles with pins through 'em, etc.
Many more could theoretically be added – 19th-century published written/illustrated observations of organisms found in a specific locality, etc. But I don’t see any of these.
Are there rules about entering historical observations on iNat - either my own photos of historical collections of preserved specimens, scanned images from old books (with a date and location recorded), or written descriptions? What are the ground rules here?
You will get a lot of helpful comments about your specific question, but one of the most powerful current uses of iNat is for management decisions about plants and wildlife. Things like range expansions, range contractions, early warnings about invasive species, etc.
For all of the above, information from even last year might be outdated.
Data from 100 years ago, while super interesting, is not the priority of iNat.
The following answers will give you details about what is and isn’t allowed, but I wanted to give you this context to frame the whole discussion.
iNat is a social network that generates data from its community and their sharing of their personal encounters with nature. It’s not a repository for data generated elsewhere. So it’s not a place for historical observations. A place like GBIF would be better. Please do not start adding observations gleaned from historical texts. iNat’s for mapping extant species recorded by its community.
Yes, there are some older observations, partly from when iNat was smaller and less strict about this. But the core of iNat is that each user is sharing their own observations and others are able to interact with each other about their own experiences. We’ve even made a date limit for observations so that no observation can have an observed-on date that’s more than 130 years old (basically the length of a human lifetime) It’s. not a place for any type of occurrence data, I’m sorry.
I disagree. It is precisely those kinds of questions that need some historical context. You can’t track range expansions or contractions without historical data, so observations from the lifespan of iNat observers is valuable (always assuming that they have an accurate date and locality).
