iNaturalist Observations as Museum Photo Vouchers?

General
2

A few thoughts:

  1. I think you’d need to make sure that the user’s observations and media licenses were set to allow this. I’m not sure which licenses would be needed, but something to look into.

  2. I’m not 100% sure how the project join works, but you’d need to make sure that there was no way a user could join the project without clicking the agree box/verbiage you propose. I don’t think it would be enough to just post that language in the project. You’d need explicit consent. You could get this another way (DM, email, etc.) too.

  3. More broadly, I don’t really see what is gained from taking this approach. If an observation is research grade on iNaturalist, it’s being exported to GBIF already. If it’s made into an NHC record, that is just duplicating data - many NHCs (though not all) post their records to some kind of data clearinghouse that ends up back with GBIF or similar. While duplicates can be filtered out with some work, it’s unclear to me what the advantage is and this is a cost.

There has been some previous discussion of the interface between iNat and NHCs collections management. The general consensus has been that on a small/occasional scale this isn’t too much of a problem, but iNat shouldn’t duplicate/be used as a collections management tool. See
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/museum-herbarium-collection-digitisation-on-inaturalist-yes-or-no/5374
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/linking-inat-records-w-museum-specimens-collected/8586
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inat-development-for-museums-or-research-centres-improve-the-value-of-research-grade-data/7743
for some thoughts

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