TLDR: Upcoming webinar which may be of interest to people here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/falling-through-the-cracks-inaturalist-invertebrate-records-in-the-uk-tickets-1461082720749
Hi all!
Later this month I’m doing a webinar all about my MSc research project which investigated how well the current digital infrastructure for recording biodiversity in the UK deals with iNaturalist records. The short answer is that currently lots of iNaturalist data is ‘falling through the cracks’. By that I mean lots of data is being ‘lost’ and not contributing to initiatives to which it could be really informative e.g. conservation planning. The main reason for this loss is that in the UK iNaturalist data is perceived by many as being low quality in terms of data quality attributes like identification accuracy, location accuracy, recorder name acceptability, and provision of supplementary information (e.g. life stage, sex). In the UK, iNaturalist records are only used once they have fed through from iNaturalist into another platform (iRecord) and gone through a round of additional verification done by volunteer taxonomic specialists. The perception of low quality is putting many such verifiers off from looking at iNaturalist records and meaning many records are not used. And yet, whilst this perception is widespread, it has never actually been quantified whether UK iNaturalist records are indeed lower quality in these regards compared to records submitted through other channels.
My research addressed this gap. I used UK non-marine invertebrates as a case study to look at how perceived data quality concerns with iNaturalist records compared with real data quality issues. There’s a lot of interesting findings, nuance and detail in my results, but it would be spoiling my talk to go over it now. If you’re interested, I suggest you sign up to hear my talk which will be on the 16th September 2025 (1–2pm UK time). The link is above. The talk will also be recorded so even if you can’t make it on the day do still sign up to be emailed access to this afterwards.
Best wishes,
Joss Carr