How do you decide whether something is "interesting" enough to observe?

Another vote for everything.

By making a conscious choice to observe some things and not others, you’re introducing bias.

It’s not unusual for us to have a better handle on the distribution and biology of rare and threatened taxa than common ones because everyone makes a point of recording the former and most people ignore the latter.

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There’s always bias though. I see users upload hundreds of car-window pictures of yucca and trees, which makes the maps line up with the interstate system. And how many is enough? One picture per ant colony? One per ant worker? One picture per species per day? Yes, let’s try to capture a broad swath of the natural world within reason.

The biggest speed bump for iNaturalist being useful to research is having observations identified accurately. Between unknowns, disagreements, and people clicking on the CV suggestion and never following up, there’s a lot of problems with the data that already exists.

One other point, which has been touched on by others. In the age of digital cameras, photograph everything you have time for! You can make the decision at home on what’s worth uploading. Personally, I try to upload every arthropod I can get a clear picture of. It’s not uncommon in New Mexico to find new state records, especially if you can nail enough detail for species. Birds though, why bother when there’s millions of data points on eBird and I only carry a smartphone and macro lens.

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Total amateur here. I find interesting and will try to photograph any arthropod I haven’t seen before; but my focus is pollinators. Lately I’ve been getting into wasps, and have found a couple of species that seem rare in my region. In my experience, interests develop organically and in relation to discoveries and shared knowledge.

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Took me a moment to understand this comment. In my part of the world October is spring!

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My criteria for an observation:
Is it alive? Can I get a photo of it? Am I able to stop what I’m doing and take that photo?
If the answer to all of the above is yes, then it’s interesting enough for a photo.
I tend to neglect plants that aren’t flowering, but for the most part I take pictures of everything.

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I usually observe everything I can get an identifiable photo of. I sometimes don’t observe super common species if I already have several observations of the species, because for me it simply isn’t worth the time to make an observation for every Willie Wagtail, Masked Lapwing, Silver Gull and Magpie-Lark I see. and I only observe animals, I’m not interested enough in plants or fungi to be bothered observing them.

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I often try to focus on groups that other people tend to overlook. A macro lens you can clip on to your smartphone helps enormously with this. If you find a roadkilled bird, check it for parasites. Liverworts, plant pathogens and leaf miners are the sorts of species that often pass unnoticed. Recording interactions such as insects visiting flowers or spiders eating prey provides interesting information. Don’t worry about bias. Nobody is going to pretend any broad-scale citizen science dataset is not biased. iNaturalist is already biased towards observations of Mallards, Honeybees and Monarchs. Adding more observations of these species (while also fine!) adds relatively little value compared to other species that are less obvious but equally interesting. It’s completely fine to find a niche and focus on that, whether it’s a taxonomic group too obscure for others to take an interest, presents difficult identification challenges, or is a place that few other observers visit.

Me too - in most of the regions where I observe, identification is very difficult/unlikely without flowers or fruits (and even then…)

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This is not an issue with observing everything, I would argue this is precisely the opposite, it’s an issue of bias from making a choice to restrict yourself to lazy and easy observations.

I don’t see the issue of observation quality to be the point when deciding which organisms to observe in the first place.

I agree with the first part of your last suggestion, but would change the decision-making step from

To specifically sat I would choose which of my photographs are of a good enough quality to become an observation. I aim to observe every plant taxon at a given locality (since that’s my personal and professional interest), but then I’m fairly ruthless in culling any photos that don’t cut the mustard for an unambiguous observation.

Even that is too far for some, since ambiguous observations still have some value.

Remember, iNaturalist is not primarily a scientific data-gathering project, it is a social network to connect people to their natural environment:

iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature

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I often find myself doing the inverse - instead of deciding whether something is interesting enough to observe, I observe as much as possible and later ask what’s the most interesting.

The most “interesting” ones to me are those that turn out to be inconclusive where an ID would be possible with additional info because they represent learning opportunities. This may result in me going on a recapture expedition retracing my steps to get more conclusive pictures. Since I mostly observe plants, that’s fortunately fairly easy to do as they don’t move around like animals.

Sometimes I have to wait for a change in seasons to eventually get an ID, e.g. when the plant is finally in bloom or fruit. Being able to tie that back to observations of the vegetative phase is interesting to me. I like to play the game of “what flower is that going to be?” when the first signs of leaves emerge in spring, and I like it when multiple observations come together to tell a story. Eventually this helps with being able to recognize species before they bloom.

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What is the local consensus on draining the lake for a golf course?

As a sweeping generalisation, most of the biomass I see is planty. And most of the Unknowns are (difficult) it’s green, it’s planty, and then? iNat is plantblind, but iNatters do see plants. I see plants, and bonus obs for the small lives on them. Pollinators and spiders and What Is THAT?

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Same approach here. I like to string together observations that are related 1) for myself, 2) for those like me and you who are into that kind of thing.
I also seem to pretty often have to go back for a second take. This is often triggered by realizing at home later going through the photos that for an ID at species level I would need a better shot of, say, the calyx, or the tip of the bracts, or the lower part of the stem to see if it is hairy or reddish or what not. Often it is the interaction with other people that prompt me to check certain particular traits. Luckily there are those who, instead of dropping another ID, do take the time to write a half-sentence of explanation why they think it’s not what I thought it was.
If iNaturalist is supposed to be “an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature”, I am afraid there are lots of people who are unaware of this.
Many seem only after upping their numbers. Too egotistic and competitive for my taste. I am more interested in learning and sharing what little I know.

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It’s a complicated issue with a lot of history - probably too long for anyone’s interest here. It might be hard to determine what constitutes ‘local consensus’. It’s golfers vs ‘naturalists’ (and by ‘naturalists’ I mean anyone who wants to maintain the lake and park as a natural space to be enjoyed by a wide variety of people). It’s also hard to determine ‘local consensus’ since the ‘drain the lake’ proposal was brought to the park board through some quiet ‘back door’ method. Almost no one in the community knew it was being considered. (This came after a long term study with lots of community input suggested the golf course should be reduced in size since the economical and ecological cost of maintaining its current size is quite high)

The thing is (which might be more interesting to a larger forum like this): the fight to preserve the natural habitat and improve the water quality of Lake Hiawatha has been long and protracted. And when we have to fight for natural spaces like this, all the data we can provide is important. Those situations may not factor into much of what iNaturalist supports but it must factor in for some. And it could factor in for much more, I believe. It’s a resource primed and ready to document how important natural spaces are - even in the middle of urban areas because sometimes we have to fight long and protracted battles.

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I hope it won’t happen, golf fields are one of the most idealess waste of natural areas (or any territory).

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Not a fan of golf courses myself as they are typically highly-modified and managed pieces of land that are devoted to one purpose, with access often very limited. And they use a lot of water. Although I’ve heard it suggested that a golf course is basically a re-creation of the open landscape of an African savannah where we evolved, but with shorter grass, fewer dangerous predators, and more little balls flying through the air.

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I think it shows what people actually know and think of savannahs.)

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I’m in Cape Town, so African savannah is alien to our summer dry mediterranean climate.

Across the middle of this picture runs Silvermine River. Running down from part of Table Mountain National Park. Source to the sea. Apart from Clovelly Golf Club diverting the water for irrigation of those swathes of neon green. This was during Cape Town’s three years of looking at Day Zero. A complete contrast to hear of cancelling a lake for the benefit of a few golfers.

PS savannah - where grass evolved - to use fire to fight trees.

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I despise golf courses as well, and you might enjoy this story too: https://sfist.com/2022/07/12/defunct-west-marin-golf-course-being-rewilded/

It’s in my neck of the woods, and very exciting to see the progress being made.

A group of golfers tried to sue the county to force them to turn it back into a golf course, but fortunately they got laughed out of court with that one.

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I’m with the “post it all” crowd, and when I go hunting I always try to include a western honeybee or two even though, well… I’m fairly new to iNat (I avoided it for years because I thought the name implied it was an iPhone thing and I’m an Android person…) but I’ve gotten pretty addicted. I think the strength of it lies in the law of large numbers, so every observation, no matter how common of an organism, contributes to the whole and makes it better. I will admit to a thrill though when I get something with few or even no observations! We’re in a great time for iNaturalists because that’s still a fairly common opportunity if you hunt for the obscure or tiny critters. Enjoy it, because in 5 or 10 years that won’t be true any more :)

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Photo and post what you want to, as much as you want to. We don’t know what future researchers will want, so we might as well do what we enjoy.

I personally vary what I post. Some days I go out to an area and try to photo every plant species and all the convenient animals and fungi I can. Maybe 600+ photos that condense down to maybe 200 observations. Other days, I just post odd or rare things. Sometimes I photo something (common or rare) just because the light is right to make an interesting photo.

Obviously, I try to post good photos, but I’m not that good a photographer. Sometimes I post blurry photos if I think they are identifiable. (Sometimes I’m wrong.)

Bottom line: I post what I enjoy posting, and I hope you do, too.

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Re: Posting dead animals

As mentioned above, dead animals provide important data points. Post them! However, messy dead animals gross out some iNaturalist users. It is polite to make the first photo in the post as inoffensive as possible. You can post a close-up of an undamaged tail or foot or something (cropped from a copy of a more general photo, if necessary). As an alternative, you can make a copy and mask all the gross parts in it, then post that as the first photo and the unmasked original second. Write a note saying “roadkill” or “gross dead animal” or providing some other warning for the unwary.

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