Dear all, I´ve already read many interesting posts on the data quality and biases, but is someone aware of “scientific” comparison of data qualtiy assesed by iNaturalist compared to expert knowledge? How valid iNat IDs are for some taxonomic groups? And if something like the “community-taxon” is im…

I feel like … especially Bryologists (moss experts) and Lichenologists have a ‘hard time’ here regarding ID quality. Both those groups are common (I mean the observed taxa, not the respective experts - these are actually a rare species here on the platform) and speciose in most areas, easy targets…

Well, what is “expert knowledge” to you? The professor emeritus of botany whose life work is the taxonomy of a branch of plantae? The English literature professor with a passion for botany with co-author credit on publications of the former? The government or NGO employee with the job title “vege…

iNat data is created by expert knowledge, so I don’t know how you can compare them, if there’re serious problems with ids it means experts aren’t playing their role. @teellbee at least this article is not really a separate entity, it’s our project here on iNat

This is a fascinating discussion with many great points, but maybe what @alexwirth was asking was actually “how accurate is iNaturalist’s Computer Vision”? with “expert” opinion assumed accurate. This would be hard to assess from existing records in part because many of us pull up the CV for an obse…

[image] janetwright: how accurate is iNaturalist’s Computer Vision”? If that is the question, a bad workman blames his tools. CV is a suggestion - we don’t all have a row of field guides, or a university library, or the time and skill to ‘key it out’. CV is a good place to start, but it is ou…

The quality of computer-vision ID suggestions has definitely improved over time. Several factors appear to have contributed to this: iNat has accumulated more observations and more human identifications over time, so computer vision has a bigger database to work from, which means it now covers mor…

[image] wdvanhem: Well, what is “expert knowledge” to you? To me, and I think for most others here, “expert” is a person who knows the group well and can identify with high accuracy at least some individuals of the taxonomic group, in some geographic areas, if the photos are good enough. Tit…

I think the best we can do is hold taxa to a set standard, e.g. someone takes the reins on identifying a group and makes consistent enough mistakes to make fixing them later much easier. It’s why I’ve made an effort to utilize my IDs to standardize the groups I like, in order to form a baseline for …

Oh wow…thank you all for your interesting comments to my question. I´m very happy to see so many interesting answers and ideas. @wdvanhem I fully the agree with the narrow view on “what are experts” and I´m happy that iNaturlist allows everyone to be an “expert”. Citizen Science is sometimes reporte…

just for all who are interested in this topic as well. I came across this interesing thesis adressing and in part comparing different systems, not only iNat. https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/26492/1/jacobs_thesis.pdf

iNat data quality in comparison to 'expert knowledge'

General

lynnharper February 22, 2023, 3:44pm 21

Absolutely!

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iNat data quality in comparison to 'expert knowledge'

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