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 collect…

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 …

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 don…

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

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 mou…

[image] aaron1508: To further promote community engagement and citizen science Do we really need a further engagement or do we need a better engagement? A would say the second. [image] aaron1508: iNaturalist could introduce localized competitive features, such as weekly or monthly contes…

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 identifi…

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 pho…

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 op…

[image] aaron1508: iNaturalist can increase both the quality and quantity of observations, especially in underrepresented areas 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://for…

INaturalist Contest?

General

DianaStuder September 21, 2024, 7:26am 5

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

20-23 September for obs, then the IDs.

Topic		Replies	Views
Create personal challenges and trophy/badge system to make iNaturalist appeal to general audience Feature Requests	21	2976	August 13, 2019
Sugestion: showing latest news from your city / country General	24	621	December 13, 2024
Recruiting more identifiers General	287	26185	December 21, 2019
Paper about inaturalist The benefits of contributing to the citizen science platform iNaturalist as an identifier General	68	3821	March 9, 2023
Engaging with nature and the slippery slope of quality General	72	2930	July 27, 2024

INaturalist Contest?

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