iNat posting etiquette questions

I view this differently. iNaturalist has a huge dataset of verifiable records what’s where when. Much of the iNaturalist data I’ll never use. Probably some of mine will never be used. I can’t know what others will want someday. Even flowering times of cultivated plants might prove useful some day. Whatever we do with the data, we’ll have to sort through it, separate the good stuff (for us) from the Muzak.

We also don’t know what an enthusiastic poster of backyard robins will go on to do later. What other creatures he may post or what other contributions he may be inspired to make toward understanding and conserving biodiversity.

So I’m OK with multiple photos of what’s in someone’s backyard. I’m even OK with multiple posts of cultivated tulips, say, though I’ll be much happier if the poster marks them as cultivated.

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There’s another problem, in some regions plants get zero attention, plus people don’t care about cultivated stuff, I remember checking California plants, saw hundreds (in fact thousands) of RG plants that are obviously cultivated. People see a plant in a pot (like a palm, not a weed) and think yeah, confirm, end of the story. That’s weird as even with that many obs that appear in Cali, I expected much less of that and more attention paid, and I in fact it’s almost everywhere on the map. And not only amatours, people with thousands+ obs don’t do that, as it seems very few people leave comments about how to post cultivated stuff. Not mentioning the known situation in South Africa where a known person post not only unknowns, but big part of those obs are cultivated, still, they’re also confirmed and RG.

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The problem becomes when people are going through observations to identify, and 90% of them are common or invasive taxa that anyone would have in their back yard. In that case people with expertise give up trying to filter the signal from the noise, and the interesting things get left unidentified.

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Backyard species don’t take long time to id though, and I’m in contact with botany experts and they always vote “more=better” while uploading data is correct and if person cares to mark thing cultivated if it is, some of them check all plant RG too.

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When there are hundreds of honeybees for every one native bee, it takes time just to scroll through them all.

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But if it’s a honey bee that’s a copy-paste work, so, well, if you want to scroll it’s ok, insects are one of the hardest group to id on iNat and there’re multiple reasons for that.

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There are a lot of ways to filter an ID search. I’d suggest you check out this thread on using iNat urls to filter.
If you don’t want to see certain species, you don’t have to. I respect you want to focus on your area of interest. But please remember, iNaturalist’s purpose is to connect people with nature, not to create data.

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I’d just like to point out that the OP is focussing on pollinators rather than the plants. It’s a great example of how one focus - domestic plants - can expand into other interests.

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I have a similar problem, but for a different reason. During our winters, there is not much out and about. I still take my camera on my walks, and have many images of Chickadees, Nuthatches and Hairy/Downy woodpeckers. When I post them I console myself with the thought that I’m confirming that they are still here, no matter what! Their absence would - to me - signify that something is wrong.

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Those don’t work if you’re trying to filter observations without IDs.

The same would apply if you were out doing fieldwork and looking for rare or exciting organisms - you spend most of the time seeing common and abundant species instead. That’s just how nature works, it’s not the fault of people observing what’s around them.

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