INaturalist Contest?

To further promote community engagement and citizen science, iNaturalist could introduce localized competitive features, such as weekly or monthly contests and leaderboards for top contributors. These metrics would incentivize users to increase their participation and would also enhance data collection in specific regions or categories of interest. By fostering friendly competition, iNaturalist can increase both the quality and quantity of observations, especially in underrepresented areas.

Suggestions:

  1. Top 100 Regional Contributors: Introduce a leaderboard that highlights the top 100 contributors within specific regions (e.g., city, state, or county) based on the number of observations, species identified, or identifications made in a given period. This could reset weekly or monthly to keep the competition fresh.

  2. Category-Specific Challenges: Create short-term challenges that focus on specific categories, such as plants, insects, or marine life. Users could compete to make the most observations within that category in a certain timeframe, and winners could be recognized on the platform.

  3. Seasonal and Biome-Specific Contests: Encourage participation by introducing competitions based on seasonal phenomena (e.g., spring flowers, migratory birds) or biome-specific goals (e.g., coastal ecosystems, wetlands). This would help improve data collection in different habitats.

  4. Achievement Badges or Rewards: Implement a system where users can earn badges or digital awards for high levels of participation, whether through quantity, quality, or the diversity of their observations. These could be tailored to local ecosystems, giving users unique goals depending on their region.

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People can already create projects that do most of these things. Many organizations use iNaturalist to host competitive projects, and the (unofficial) iNat Discord server runs a competition almost every month. I don’t think iNaturalist as a whole is going to adopt any of these suggestions, but feel free to join, create and promote projects!

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And I don’t want to hose down your enthusiasm for encouraging participation - but anything where the emphasis is on collecting the most points as fast as possible, is a bit down the path of “can’t see the forest for the trees”.

In a world where people already measure the worth of what they have done by the number of likes they get from people who paused their rapid scrolling just long enough to hit that button - where they are constantly being told they must fill their buckets of Things They Must See to overflowing - then more red cordial and a bigger bucket isn’t really something that they need other people to incentivise them to reach for. Or a recipe to improve the quality of their lives (or that of the people in the places they go to fill those buckets).

If the quality of an experience is measured by the degree to which it is genuinely life changing or in some way revelatory (and I don’t mean “omg, I’ve seen the Eiffel tower too, we should be besties!!!”) - and the aim is to maximise the chances of that - then the skill that most people need to learn is to Slow Down. And to stop being blind to anything that wasn’t on the brochure telling them what they have come to see.

Simply making observations on inat (especially if being laser focused on that as the goal itself), isn’t inherently conducive to having or documenting that kind of priceless experience - but inat is a great place to help you connect with other people whose own experiences can help you explain and understand that one amazing, surprising, almost ineffable, thing you saw, which you stopped and watched in awe last weekend. That’s the priceless thing here that all the data in all the databases can never replace.

You can buy a ticket to ‘see’ just about anything these days, and read a beautifully written explainer that you can memorise and recite to your friends about the ‘experience’ you were told you’d been sold and why they should buy one too to tick off of their lists. But nature doesn’t care about what you were sold a ticket for. It’s doing all sorts of amazing things you were never taught to expect all around you all the time. Being completely invisible to the people who bought a ticket to see something else is just one of them!

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https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2024-umbrella

20-23 September for obs, then the IDs.

And you can see the HUMUNGOUS spike in iNat obs each year for the City Nature Challenge in April

https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2023

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To use City Nature Challenge as an example, what I typically see in contest settings is a whole bunch of observations, but not an equal rise in identifications. People observe, but no one joins the identifiers. That’s actually a big complaint every year regarding CBC is that suddenly there’s a mountain of low quality observations that the identifiers now have to wade through.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoy CNC. I have a competitive nature, so contests appeal to me, but these contests tend to have a low rate for bringing in new identifiers.

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Do we really need a further engagement or do we need a better engagement? A would say the second.

Please, do not do it. Whenever a competition is introduced in using iNat all hell breaks loose. I mean that the result is a mess with users usually photographing everything (I mean everything, living and not living, wild and not especially not wild because it is easier).

EDIT: the prize should be just one: knowledge. I think that staying in nature while observing and registering biodiversity is itself a rewarding activity. iNat can make this activity easier and allows to contribute to make a world geodatabase of living organisms.

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It is interesting to think about how “better engagement” would look like. It would be an idea to have official regional/local Inat meetups. These could be in-person or online, in order to do a bit of capacity building regarding high-quality nature observations, but giving introductions into identification and finally to connect further within the Inat community…
Not the same thought, but a bit related: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/adding-a-category-community-events/5178

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I think that there can be multiple aspects that can be improved the way many users use iNat. To cite one, just think about all those unidentifiable observations with just one blurry photo. Maybe, if people would understand that the app allows to upload multiple photos that can be chosen from the phone gallery in order to discard those badly made, this could be improved. This is an old argument discussed in the past in the forum. Regarding the “further engagement” I am afraid that in many cases it would end up in a further but also worst engagement. Examples of “not so good” engagement are seen everyday.

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Inspiring idea! In projectnoah.org we used to be awarded ‘Batches’ for different areas and numbers of ‘achievements’.
However I feel iNat quite a serious forum, and hence I’d rather go for quality than quantity. I feel experts are already overwhelmed by countless numbers of requests for IDs, and opinions. Some events like NMW, CNC, and recently @ram_k had successfully conducted ‘Monsoon Beauty’, etc. may be alright but ‘daily gruelings’ may be too stressful, especially to senior members like me, moreover in the enthusiasm to boost numbers eventually may follow fall in quality of observations.

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In theory, good - but in fact, if it is more obs of poor quality, and lacking identifiers - the result is not helpful.

I prefer encouraging identifiers
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identifriday-is-the-happiest-day-of-the-week/26908
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/annotation-sunday/55342

Or simply pick a not observose place and help to ID there. Especially for new observers who need encouraging. We would like to keep the newbies coming back and joining in.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/low-growth-countries-and-territories

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Luckily nobody can oblige me to participate in any of this ‘organized fun’.

Frankly, I have come to detest all this competitiveness, this craving for numbers, for making leaderboards, for earning badges in challenges.
Why can’t people just enjoy Nature? Enjoy the sounds of Nature rather than the chattering of folks that seem to just never shut up? Take time to observe what a particular creature is doing, how it behaves, what strategies it has to do things? I love doing that – rather than clicking away to earn some insignificant ‘badge’ in a challenge.

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That was what I used to do, before I had a macro camera. That is what I still do, since I don’t have a telephoto camera.

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Getting more people involved is good. I have no objection to an effort like this. However it doesn’t interest me, either. What would intrigue me more would be some method of increasing participation in identifying.

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You’ve heard of FOMO? Fear Of Missing Out? Well, one problem with increasing participation in identifying is FOBW – Fear Of Being Wrong. Various threads have pointed out that, over time, identifications are self-correcting; but that dosn’t seem to alleviate the angst of those among us who “only add an ID if I’m certain.”

Please, add an ID even if you are a bit uncertain. You just may be right; and even if you are not, you are almost certainly at least partially right, that is, you will have taken it to the right family, genus, or similar broader level. The worst that can happen is that someone disagrees, and then you have an opportunity to reconsider and maybe increase your knowledge.

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I’ve come to appreciate my wrong ID’s that lead to the right answer! I ID an unknown as Lepidoptera and pretty soon it’s labeled a Sawfly. My Brown Algae often go to Red Algae, and my Red Algae often go to some phylum I cannot remember, but if totally unidentified they’d go nowhere. That’s especially obvious if I’m IDing Needs ID observations that sat at “Unknown” for years. There are lots of other examples at genus or species levels, too. At least I helped move the ID forward (with a step to the side).

Of course, I also make lots of errors that are just errors, not helpful at all, except perhaps to give the next identifier a pleasant sense of superiority. So it goes. My son-in-law, an avid bicyclist, has said, “If you’re going to ride a bike, you’re going to fall off.” If you’re going to ID, you’re going to make mistakes. Just move on, perhaps learning something in the process (though that’s not required).

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No, the worst that can happen is that an observation goes to Research Grade and therefore GBIF at the wrong species. This can be mitigated by only adding genus or higher IDs when you’re not certain, though.

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I have seen observations come back from RG when someone disagrees.

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That’s true, they certainly can. It’s just much less likely that a misID will be corrected once the observation is RG, since most identifiers don’t filter for those. It’s not a huge concern but I would still advise inexperienced identifiers not to go to species if they’re uncertain. I know I made a few mistakes due to overconfidence at first.

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