Humans are nature, the only “problem” is that humans have some rights, like the right on theyr own picture, so we should not upload them like animals or plants without theyr consent. 
A couple of years ago we got into a “Campus Nature Challenge” in the UNC system and had a blast with it. This year we’re probably going to have five universities competing for the unofficial title of “most biodiverse campus” and we have enough data by now that it has been used class projects and student research. Are there other universities covering other areas of your state? You could maybe start a friendly competition and create an umbrella project to keep track of who’s in the lead. Promoting it to fellow students like a sports event as in “let’s beat XY University at this biodiversity game” may appeal to their competitive nature. It worked for us (and probably also helped that we had some professor offer extra credit for participating).
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Um, no one ever said diplomacy is easy. Being a diplomat takes skill, patience and playing the long game.
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Erm, what was the quality of the observations uploaded in this context? Were the professors encouraging students to participate also monitoring their contributions and communicating about problems? How were the students introduced to iNat?
Because on the surface, this sounds like a recipe for exactly the sorts of problems that plagued the CNC. Given your background and post history, I am assuming that the actual approach was somewhat more nuanced, but perhaps it would be useful to describe some of the strategies that you used to prevent a proliferation of observations of classmates and campus flower beds and copyrighted or faked material.
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That would make an excellent outreach project for an ambassador: a talk to a garden club, or at a public garden, about how to use iNat to learn about the organisms (besides cultivated plants) that can be found in a garden.
It would be helpful to introduce Seek as an alternative to iNat for folks who just want a quick ID.
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With all the horror stories floating around the forum I was pleasantly surprised but maybe our students (college-level, mostly bio majors) are more mature than others. It certainly helped that our “winners” were all already familiar with how iNat works and we could also rely on students teaching students as they were observing together. For the first one (2022) we’re at 55% RG now. Some notes:
We predictably had a lot of cultivated plants at first and had to keep on top of DQA’ing and commenting on those to get the point across, but two things really helped: 1) Better onboarding of participating faculty trickling down to better instructions for the students, and 2) students who do it for credit learn that their observations need to be verifiable (wild, location marked correctly etc.) if they want to get the points. It’s really important that casual observations get marked ASAP so students can learn and self-correct while the BioBlitz is still in progress.
There were some goofy pictures of students posing with plants for each other’s observations but I only saw one Homo sapiens joke observation out of over 10,000 total by now (of the instructor, not a fellow student) and I’m not aware of any copyright infringements. Overall it seemed everyone was having a lot of fun, which was great to see. Students wrongly confirming each other’s IDs also was a non-issue for us, but we also made sure to point out that Needs ID still counted. I would stay away from requiring research grade.
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Yes, we’ve done a campus EcoBlitz at Binghamton University for 3 years now, and have had similar positive results. The professors who promote or require it in courses either use iNat regularly themselves or have TAs who do. The organizing committee does make sure to check observations frequently and provide feedback. I think it helps that we run it for a couple of weeks each year, rather than trying to do it over a day or a weekend, so there’s less of a sense of urgency. We do have a kickoff event where people lead nature tours, give ID demos, etc.
This spring’s EcoBlitz is at 44% RG, and only 1% of the observations needed to be marked Casual. A lot of the Needs ID are still there at least partially because they’re just hard to ID: little insects, fungi, plants that were just starting to bloom, etc.
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