exactly.
observation means 1 user observes 1 organism
50 observations can mean 1 user observed 50 organisms or 50 users observed 1 organism
To assume that number of observations relates to abundance of the organism rather than abundance of the observers seeing the organism is just poor study design, and no one using iNat’s data scientifically should ever make this assumption.
iNat documents how commonly observed a species is, not how common the species is. If 100 people observe a bird, that bird was 100 times more observed than a bird only observed by 1 person, and it will show up 100 times more on iNat. This isn’t a bug or a problem or a pitfall to be avoided- it’s exactly what iNat was meant for. If someone wants to try to extrapolate actual species abundances from iNat’s dataset, they’re going to need to do some serious “massaging” of the data to get anything useful, because that’s simply not what iNat’s format is intended to record.
So yeah, observe away. If all 50 people in your party observe the same tree, great. The mission is to maximize how many people are engaging with nature, not to rigorously build a dataset of species abundances.