[image] iNat Interest in UX Research? Out of curiosity, have you ever done any estimate of how many taxa there are for which inat has more observations than all herbaria/museum specimens combined? I’m not sure but maybe @loarie or @carrieseltzer has done this kind of comparison?

[image] iNat Interest in UX Research? Out of curiosity, have you ever done any estimate of how many taxa there are for which inat has more observations than all herbaria/museum specimens combined? a relevant blog https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/76606-thank-you-for-helping-generate-most-gbif-…

Interesting! Do most herbarium/museum specimens have gbif records, and are they the bulk of non-inat gbif observations from 2020-2023? I feel like at some point the growth rate of the inat (+ebird/other citizen science) dataset has to be larger than the growth rate for professional deposits for most…

[image] wildskyflower: Do most herbarium/museum specimens have gbif records No, not even remotely close. This recent paper provides a rough estimate that, of the specimens held by 73 of the largest institutions globally (although they are certainly not the 73 largest by any stretch of the ima…

This varies hugely by the specific institution. Wealthy countries have put a fair amount of funding towards digitizing records, as have wealthier institutions. Smaller institutions, those with fewer resources, or those in less resourced countries have much lower rates of digitization. Of course, in …

Right, I think the core distinction you are making is: can the ID be revised without intervention by the original observer (other than by atlas) if taxonomic concepts are redefined? If so, specimen voucher (inat, physical specimens). If not, occurrence record (ebird).

The herbarium at Oregon State University, by far the largest in the state, has 167,000 vascular plant specimens from Oregon, and about 350,000-400,000 total vascular plants (from everywhere). iNaturalist has about 587,310 observations of vascular plants in Oregon.

Generally speaking, I think it is safe to say that iNat will always have more records of species that can be identified via photos. You have a whole userbase of interested folks looking, observing, photographing, and documenting flora and fauna on a mass scale.

[image] sedgequeen: and about 350000-4000000 total vascular plants 350,000 - 4,000,000 is quite a wide range. Is there a stray zero in there perhaps?

[image] jhbratton: 350,000 - 4,000,000 is quite a wide range. Is there a stray zero in there perhaps? Oops! Corrected now. Thank you for pointing this out.

iNat species numbers vs museum/herbaria

General

tiwane June 14, 2023, 10:34pm 4

I split this from the original topic.

Topic		Replies	Views
Museum/herbarium collection digitisation on iNaturalist, yes or no? General	18	3251	July 30, 2019
Relevance of iNat data in research Nature Talk	1	663	June 7, 2019
iNaturalist ID as herbarium reference? General	32	1730	June 21, 2023
How to treat photos of herbarium records? General	9	1557	June 7, 2020
Non-target observations in herbarium specimens - do they have a place on iNaturalist? General	32	1217	July 19, 2022

iNat species numbers vs museum/herbaria

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