I post lots of photos but I’m retired and have time and I enjoy doing that. I think the point is having fun while providing data, not number in themselves. (I’m also posting lots of observations that are from the past 40 years, not current.) I’d say, visit places you enjoy visiting, or use iNaturalist as an incentive to get out and walk. Photo what interests you and post what you have time for.
As someone who identifies a lot, I have to say that the suggestion to post a single photo multiple times if it shows multiple species can be good – in moderation. Certainly if your photo shows well a butterfly on a flower, post them both. There aren’t many cases, though, where a single photo shows more than three or maybe four species well enough to identify easily. I know one guy who takes landscape-scale photos, then searches them for everything that might be identifiable. He posts a copy of that photo for each species. More than once, I’ve said the equivalent of “No, that species isn’t shown” and he’s come back with, “Yes, it’s there, one plant about 2/3 of the way to the lower left corner.” I look and yes, it’s there, but I don’t want to waste my time looking for tiny images of weedy grasses. Now, I just skip by his observations. Please, if possible, look closely while you’re out in the field and get closer to the targets so it fills a larger part of the screen.
And you might find photographing plants will become addictive.
As someone with thousands of photos and audio in my backlog some of it going back four years ago, maximizing observations just causes burnout! Only do the amount you’re comfortable with.
I don’t have very many observations compared to “power users,” but I’ve found that making observations at various times of day (and in various weather conditions) is a great way to observe species I’ve never encountered before.
If person asks about it, they definitely care, different users can choose what they like about iNat and high number of good observations is never a minus, iNat has a lot of competetion in it, there’re leaderboards, projects, leaderboards within project, tops of the month and year, etc.
If someone’s seriously into it, we shouldn’t talk them away from doing that, it’s not a reason for stressing out, but can be a good goal.
Living in an urban environment is hard. I don’t try to compete with anyone, but instead set goals for myself. For example, I am going on a walk and want to take 100 observations including at least 20 insects. Here are some tips that might help:
Try to observe what you can around your home and workplace. If you observe what weeds are blooming in the lawn, or what flowers are blooming in the parking lot, or what pollinators are visiting which flowers, or what birds are eating the French fries in the parking lot – even that is great data!
Try to go on a regular walk or hike in a natural space. I try at least one day per month to visit a local park or greenway, sometimes less but often more . When I go on a hike or long walk, I try to document at least one of every plant I see. In my early iNat days, I used to try to learn a new plant to ID with every walk, but now it’s a lot harder, since I’ve learned most of the common plants in the area. Now I try to observe a certain number of insects with each walk.
Speaking of insects – Mothing! I’ve only done one mothing event, but I plan on doing many more this year. With mothing, they actually come to you! After sunset, you set up a white sheet with a black light on it, and hundreds of insects including moths will come towards the light. If you don’t have a black light, you can use a standard bulb, but you’ll get more with a black light. You can see all the moth observations on iNat taken on a white sheet, no fancy camera or equipment needed! There might even be mothing events near you where you can share the experience with others!
Just have fun! What works for me might not be fun for someone else. What I treat as a game, others might find boring or burdensome. Find what tips you like and what kind of goals you like to set.
This is true! The more familiar we are with regularly occurring species, the more likely we will see something out of the ordinary when it shows up or when we see it!
I know one guy who takes landscape-scale photos, then searches them for everything that might be identifiable. He posts a copy of that photo for each species. More than once, I’ve said the equivalent of “No, that species isn’t shown” and he’s come back with, “Yes, it’s there, one plant about 2/3 of the way to the lower left corner.” I look and yes, it’s there, but I don’t want to waste my time looking for tiny images of weedy grasses.
Argh, I agree that’s no way to post observations of anything. I mostly post plants, and sometimes catch pollinating insects on them. Then an entomologist asked if I could post more observations of pollination from my area. Now if I notice insects on the plants, I post separate observations for the flower and the insect, and sometimes also add them to the Pollinator Associations Project. However:
I crop each picture to centre the organism for that observation.
I add comments to describe which organism is relevant to that observation.
To get back to the original question, for a while I was guilty of treating every bushwalk I went on as a place to maximise the number of observations I made. Then I realised I was being silly and wasting identifiers’ time. I still post a lot, but I try to get to places that are sparsely documented in iNaturalist. I agree with @natemarchessault that quality is more important than quantity, and I try to make sure I document all parts of an organism that may be relevant.
Two other things about people with tens of thousands of identifications:
They may be uploading an entire lifetime of careful record-keeping. I joined iNaturalist in 2019, but from 2014 onwards I was geotagging and labelling my photographs. Others out there are scanning and posting from the 1980s.
I still mostly stumble across things over the course of a few hours. Meanwhile, a domain expert can step into the bush and in minutes walk up to the one tree that has orchids growing under it, or the fallen trunk that has decayed enough for slime moulds to start growing, or the one dragonfly that is about to sit still enough to photograph. Some get that way through formal study, others through a few decades of looking around.
Unless it’s a very common organism, I think it’s preferred that you crop to the organism being observed. Remember that your observations are being used to train the Computer Vision that does so much of the identifying. You’d be surprised how many times the name of a plant is suggested for a photo of butterfly or even a beetle. That’s due to the beetle being photographed so often on a flower and left uncropped that the AI assumes it’s part of the organism.
I do this sometimes. Are there leaf mines? Or mosses and lichens? Insects on plants? Galls? Rust fungi or powdery mildews? If so, are those happens-to-be-in-the-photo clear enough to be posted themselves?
If nothing else it’s a good way to learn about things that are often overlooked!
There’s no accounting for people. If I was going to put in that much effort, I wouldn’t do it for iNaturalist; I would do it as a serious vegetation transect meant to answer a scientific question.
One thing I learned in my training for the world of scientific research: you don’t just gather data at random. Serious researchers are focused in what data they gather, how, and for what purpose. Are you surveying the biodiversity of a specific site? Are you trying to parse out the vegetation dynamics? Quantify trophic webs? Each of these reasons for data gathering will cause you to gather different data, by different methods.
What I am trying to say is, pisum asked a fair question:
Your answer to that question will affect the approach you take.
Well . . . scientists who use this data should have questions to answer, questions that determine what data they try to mine from the complicated treasure trove that is iNaturalist. However, I can’t know what, if anything, they will want from me, beyond the baseline of identifiable photos with accurate date and location. So, I post what observations I choose to post. Some days, I post tons of photos, because I find that fun. Other days I post few or none. Sometimes I have a theme: all the oaks in one park (though no one wanted to know), long transects of Douglas-fir suffering from heat damage; all the plant species I can photo at a park I’m visiting, nearly daily photos of squirrels acting funny at my bird feeders (not a theme others are likely to care about). Sometimes, my posts are nearly random assortments of organisms that happened to interest me.
You know what? It’s all OK. I suspect a guiding principle of iNaturalist is that once a whole lot of data is gathered by lots of people with different methods and interests, the variations kind of average out and that mass of data includes enough useful information for someone to use.
Many specimens in natural history collections were obtained during general or opportunistic collecting efforts. No specific study in mind, but once preserved in a collection they become available for future studies by others.
