Many times I have seen someone upload multiple different pictures of the exact same organism at the exact same place and time. Every observation is basically just the same animal in a slightly different position. I feel like that’s the kind of posts you shouldn’t do, because as has already been stated, it makes a hotspot on the map for that species that isn’t really there.
I don’t think duplicates causing ‘hotspots’ on maps are a problem, because:
and:
Personally, I’ve uploaded about 13% of all Euglesa observations on iNat, and all but one of them are within ~500 feet of eachother. I’ve been consistently visiting this location (so much so that I’ve made a project over it) and this creates a very noticeable hotspot on the map:
But should I stop posting valid Euglesa observations because of this? I wouldn’t say so. I’d argue that if it’s easy to create a hotspot on the map, the taxon is under-observed on iNat and needs more observations.
Also, there are many projects that cover a fairly small area, similar to mine, like yard projects. If observations are consistently being posted from a single place, even over years, it’s going create a hotspot anyway. In an ideal iNat-world, there would be many people observing from every place they could: every ditch, every park, every field, every stream. But that’s unlikely to happen, so the best we can do is focus on the places we can, regardless of how small. So, if that means posting multiple observations of the same taxa in the same place, that’s fine. This isn’t to say consistent exact duplicates are ok, but they aren’t too much of a problem on the larger scale.
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I think this is generally the result of users not realizing that they can upload multiple photos in one observation.
For researchers using the data (multiple records by the same observer with an identical timestamp and location), it seems like this is the easiest sort of duplicate to identify and remove from one’s dataset.
So I don’t see it as a big problem as much from a data standpoint as from an IDer standpoint, as it can be frustrating and time-consuming to try to separately ID multiple records that should all be together, particularly if it is an organism where different views are needed for ID or if the observations have been uploaded with incorrect IDs.
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Thank for your thoughtful answer to my question.
If you look at the various pictures on my observation of Cattle Egrets, you can see that the first two are of the same fledging. The last two are of the same adult flying to its nest in the rookery. The middle pictures are of different adults. Here is a link to the page again: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/228525153
My thinking was that I didn’t want to clutter my observations up with so many pictures of the same species unless it was necessary because the pictures were taken at the different times or locations. I will try to conform better in the future.
This is how it went, when I first began. I read the intro material but it was still cryptic, to understand precisely how to do what we do here. So, in some of my early entries I uploaded the same individual bee, as separate observations (e.g 2-4 separate pictures; and I did this several times until someone pointed out the error). I’ve combined some but not all.
On a distantly related topic, I was investigating some of the icons here, and trying to hover the cursor over each to read up. I have a slight bit of hand tremor now and accidentally clicked two of them. One for bookmarking and one “flagged” this post. Apologies. I can delete my bookmark but as for the other… well whoever sees a “flag” can ignore it. (Unless it’s a white flag in which I might be asking for help… 
)
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I appreciated reading the thoughts, opinions, and suggestions of everyone that has chimed in on this topic. One suggestion I particularly appreciate is providing observers with a link to a tutorial on combining multiple observations into a single observation. When I have alerted observers in the past to their duplicate postings, and how their photos should instead be combined into a single observation, I pretty much just left it at that and assumed they would figure it out. But I should have been giving more consideration to the potential that knowing or figuring out how to do so might not be entirely obvious or intuitive for many new iNat users. So, in an effort to be more helpful to folks, I plan to start also including that tutorial link in the future.
But a specific scenario I would like to hear others’ thoughts on, which I don’t think has really been touched on in this thread, at least not in depth (unless I overlooked it), is that in which the “duplicated” observations have been uploaded by multiple users who apparently–or sometimes very obviously–were out photographing wildlife together. So, in particular, scenarios where several new observations are uploaded by two or more users of what are clearly the same individual organisms in the exact same location, with the photos for each individual taken only a couple of minutes or so apart between each observer.
Of course, “iNat-ing” with friends is certainly not a thing to be discouraged! But I feel like, in these scenarios, it would be best for the observers to try to divvy up the observations they upload to iNat after a given shared field outing, instead of them both/all uploading every observation, which then become what are effectively several duplicate observations (even if each observer has uploaded only the photo(s) that they took of each individual organism). For example, they can agree that one of them will upload only the observations of species A, B, and C, and the other will upload only the observations of species X, Y, and Z. But, again, I’m curious to see what others think about this. Thanks!
There is an observation field for that: Same specimen, different observer.
I wouldn’t want to be made to feel like I should ‘divvy up’ observations that I’ve seen while out with someone else. What happens if we encounter several common species and then three rare ones that are life list firsts for the both of us – do we need to decide which of us gets to post two while the other only gets to post one? Similarly, what if a group of 30 people is participating in a BioBlitz – do they all need to exchange contact information in order to coordinate who uploads each species after the event is over? Do people visiting from out of state get priority over those who live locally? Or what if I post an observation of a plant I’ve seen before (but I now have great photos instead of my previous poor-quality cellphone shots) and later in the same day you, by chance, encounter the same plant, which is a life list first for you – should users be telling you that you need to remove your observation because it’s already been observed from that day, or should they be telling me that I need to remove my observation because I’ve already seen it before but you haven’t?
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This situation can be a little annoying for IDers, but is totally fine under iNat’s guidelines, so I wouldn’t discourage observers from doing it. As long as everyone is using their own photos, there’s no problem.
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Ah! Thanks for pointing that out!
Thanks, whaichi. Great example scenarios to consider. Assuming folks would probably respond with a whole host of good reasons such as these to recommend against discouraging anyone from posting observations in the manner with which I expressed concern is why I definitely wanted to reach out to the community before I even thought of doing so! My feelings about this stemmed from a deeply-entrenched “don’t skew the data!” mindset, which can be hard for me to suppress. (And not specific to just this particular arena.) But of course, the data on iNat is going to be inherently skewed for multiple reasons, regardless. And as swampster stated in the very first response to the original question: “iNat data doesn’t equate to and shouldn’t be translated as abundance data”.
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