We are planning to conduct a bioblitz (or maybe a research project) in our school and the surrounding areas. We are thinking of having other participants (above 13) participate and learn about the surrounding ecosystems.
However, we do not trust everyone to create Inaturalist accounts for the sake of this project, as we are concerned about a few of the issues stated in the Inat for Educators blog. We plan to divide participants into teams, with trusted organisers as leads to make sure the pictures are taken by the participants, they do not harm the environment, and that they do not take inappropriate pictures.
However, the issue lies in identification; we have tested Seek and found that it doesn’t return local species or cannot identify to a useful level (cannot identify till at least a family level). Whereas iNaturalist does so.
So, how can we have the Inatuarlist community identify species without having to risk issues with participants using Inaturalist? Can we upload their pictures on a common account while giving them credit (copyright ig)?
Edit: I would also add that I’m a student myself (I have used iNaturalist for a few years now), looking at this from a CAS, research and education/awareness standpoint. So if there are any other steps that I would need to take to successfully organise this (from a technical standpoint on iNat), it would be appreciated.
If participants are above the age of 13, it is possible to monitor their observations if they have their own accounts pretty effectively as long as your educators require them to provide their usernames and then review what the student accounts produce. To make this easier, you can require students to join a project for instance. You can make rules about content related to grades or other external factors (eg, one letter grade off for each observation you upload that doesn’t have your own photos, etc.).
It’s also fine to have classroom accounts that are run by a teacher/educator that all students post to. There isn’t an effective way to have the copyright for photos go to individual students with this route, but unless there’s a specific reason that this is a major concern, I wouldn’t worry about it. It is pretty unlikely that students’ photos will be “worth money” or similar. Additionally, if you are worried about student privacy, claiming copyright for them individually would break this.
I think there is definitely a way to do what you would like with iNat and make the project a success, and thanks for making the effort to read the Educators section and ask questions to make your project the best it can be!
I work with science education - research and teacher training - and we have quite a lot of succesful experiences with letting young students create and use iNaturalist accounts. It is important, when they are introduced to the task, to show them examples of observations in their area, and to give them the opportunity to understand and appreciate that their observations will be part of an actual research database, GBIF. We also strongly recommend that students make usernames that are not associated with personal data - so, independent login, not through facebook or google, and using names that are not identifiable (not some firstname-lastname-combo).
If students add their usernames to your Bioblitz-project, it is easy to curate for inappropriate content - but we never had any problems with that.
As a spinoff, many students keep using their usernames after the project, in their daily lives. And of course this is ultimately the aim of all education: To introduce meaningful content, which students will carry with them outside the classroom.
I hope this helps. To see examples from the biggest inat-related project I have been involved with in a Danish school context, here are a bunch of links to some of the local projects participating in our educational project “99 species to see before you grow up”:
I would also add that I’m a student myself (I have used iNaturalist for a few years now) looking at this from a CAS, research and education/awareness standpoint. So if there are any other steps that I would need to take to successfully organise this (from a technical standpoint on iNat), it would be appreciated
Is it possible to know how to curate content and how to have it removed, if any such content (AI-generated, plagiarised, others’ photos, etc.) is posted.
I’m not sure how much overlap there might be but the ExoExplore initiative (iNat project) is working with children who don’t have their own iNat accounts. There is a review step to assure observations are appropriate before being uploaded to iNaturalist. You could maybe try reaching out to them to find out how they organize that.
Can’t students be required to renounce copyright on schoolwork? I think students taking photos for a school project is equivalent to employees doing so for a company as far as copyright is concerned–at least that’s what I was told in my high school journalism class.
This doesn’t address the main issue which is that duress users will do the minimum effort to get by.
This ups the minimum effort, and we appreciate that, but I still think that a sandbox environment is more suitable for users who are not joining on their own volition.
Yeah, I forgot to mention that it would be open to those who want to participate. People have to register to join. Therefore, participants wouldn’t have to be forced to do so, and participation would be of their own volition.
As I understand it, Ecoexplore is run by an organization in North Carolina and focuses specifically on that state. I think their model basically boils down to “kids take photos and manually note relevant details, then send those photos and notes to Ecoexplore people to review, and then the Ecoexplore people post the photos to iNaturalist on dedicated Ecoexplore accounts,“ which could certainly be implemented on a smaller scale with no special tools other than email or texting.
Getting back to the OP’s post, I would generally advocate for a shared account that is actively monitored by someone familiar with iNaturalist who can (1) deal with problem behavior directly (e.g. copyright infringement) without having to offload that administrative burden to the volunteer curators who moderate the site, (2) perhaps field questions that identifiers may have about the observations, and (3) also edit the account’s observations and IDs if needed (e.g. observations missing data, clearly incorrect IDs).
From an identifier’s perspective, the perpetual issues with the other main approach (course projects involving individual student accounts) are the typical suite of “duress user” concerns, such as low-quality and utterly unidentifiable photos, copyright infringement, never responding to comments or disagreeing IDs, bad attitudes towards the identifiers who correct their IDs, 5 billion observations of the exact same individual organism, abandoning their accounts as soon as the class is done, spamming observations and IDs, and dogpiling agreements of each others’ IDs just for the sake of RG (those last two are of a particular concern if the course project organizer is foolish enough to try to turn the project into a numbers-based competition or explicitly require Research Grade for observations to “count”).
Most of the competition lies in the understanding of the ecosystem around the school and how we could help support more biodiversity, and iNat is just being used as a tool to understand these species. That being said, research grade is not necessary, but for our own research, at least till family identification is required. For this purpose, our only concern is clear pictures (the subject is seen)
And going off your advice, maybe a separate iNaturalist account would work, in which all pictures that are uploaded are checked beforehand and are uploaded with the public domain. Reinforcing that this project is from a CAS, research and education/awareness standpoint, with only some friendly competition. Again, making sure this occurs properly with the organisers taking care of the teams.
Side note: We are familiar with how iNatualist works, and have myself been with the community from lockdown.
We already have a plan for that issue. It is unavoidable for new participants not to know the difference between cultivated, native and invasive/feral species, and I agree that it should be acknowledged. The team leaders will help teach the difference between them and what pictures to take. After all, one of our secondary goals is to teach how we can identify the differences and why they matter. Furthermore, any cultivated species pictures taken will be filtered before uploading (we have a list of all decorative/cultivated plants here). Also, our schoolyard is just adjacent to a small forested area and lake, and from individual observations, we have noticed that the species density is quite large for birds, insects and moths, and have consequently decided to do this project.
You are clearly planning on putting more thought, care, supervision, and data curation into this than the vast majority of organizers of CNC projects and school course projects (which is where the PTSD us identifiers are projecting comes from).
As long as you walk the walk, by and large, you should be fine.
One last piece of advice from me - teach your students how to take good, clear, in-focus photos of whatever they’re observing that are at an appropriate level of zoom and are from angles that are helpful for ID.
Make sure they know how tap-to-focus works on their devices, and some workarounds to try to get the camera to focus if that doesn’t work (e.g. hold a hand or other object at the same distance as the organism and get the phone to focus on that)
Show them the differences between good lighting and bad lighting (for instance, if an organism is strongly backlit in a photo, it’s probably going to be just a silhouette. Or if an animal is captured in a container to allow for better photo opportunities, turn the flash on so we don’t just get a photo of a dark blob in a dark bucket)
Make sure the organism takes up a solid portion of the photo - zoom in with your camera if needed. Particularly since iNaturalist resizes photos above 2048 pixels, highly zoomed out photos are harder to ID. If details in a more zoomed out photo might be helpful for ID (such as showing the immediate environment or allowing for ID of a host plant to further narrow down the possible IDs), take two photos - one zoomed out, one zoomed in.
If it’s a busy photo where the organism is hard to pick out, either include a note indicating what part of the photo to look at, or annotate the image with a circle or arrow.
Tell the students what sorts of angles tend to be the most helpful for identification (for instance, for most arthropods, nothing beats a good dorsal view)