iNaturalist Research Project Fall 2020

some more typos in the taxonomy section:
“iNaturalist has produced many more research-grade observations on animals and plants (Kingdoms Animalia and Plantae ) than on fungi.”
" Class Aves (birds) and Class Insecta have many more observations in Kingdom Animalia that the runner ups: reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and Actinopterygii ( ray-finned fish)."
" Order Passeriformes was the most frequent category among birds. This is reasonable, since Passeriformes…"
Unfortunately I never find them in my own texts ;-)

3 Likes

“This excludes lichens and moss, which perhaps are considered “boring” to observe and identify among iNaturalist’s user-base.”

I would not say that these are “boring” to identify, but along with fungi, might need chemical, microscopic, or other analysis, rather than just visual inspection, in order to be identified to species.

3 Likes

I’m shocked one only has to observe 1250+ times per year to be in the top 1% of observers!

4 Likes

I’d love to see “II. Do different geographic regions have different popular taxonomic categories?” done with plants

3 Likes

As far as I can tell, the report covers only active users, correct? By ‘active’, I mean users who have posted at least one observation. By inspection of the iNat user community, it seems evident that the median number of observations among all iNat accounts is zero. Curious whether your dataset allows you to assess the veracity of that.
This apparent large burden of completely inactive users makes name-searching quite a chore, burdening curatorial time. And, I think, it reflects over-enthusiastic recruitment.

1 Like

this is not necessarily true; many of these zero observation users are very active identifiers, including users with hundreds of thousands of IDs

1 Like

statistically, only a few percent of zero-observation users have any IDs at all. loarie did a blog post and mentioned that somewhere…

3 Likes

To clarify, the median user has zero activity of any type. I reached this by randomly searching user names and perusing results. (Try it yourself, and see what you find)
I posted my remark to see whether there is data to support the assertion which I arrived at entirely casually. Though I suppose it could be asserted that I used a monte carlo approach.

1 Like

Do you mean statistically or just from experience?

I kind of wish that in the sections on activity and super-users, you’d looked at identification activity and top identifiers as well as observation activity and top observers. After all, there are many databases you can submit observations to, but iNaturalist is one of the few where identification has such a large role. It would have been interesting to see side-by-side comparisons of the growth of observers/observations and identifiers/identifications, and maps showing super-identifiers who do the most geographically distributed and/or concentrated identifications. I’d especially liked to have seen the share of leading and improving identifications done by the top 1% of identifiers vs everyone else, as was done for observers, and the taxons where the largest numbers of leading and improving identifications are done by the fewest users.

Maybe that’s too much to ask for an already large project. Next fall’s project could be to add all the parallel analysis for identifications.

Good work.

5 Likes

loarie compiled a lot of statistics on this in this blog post.
from the chart, it would appear that roughly half of iNat users have zero obs and zero IDs.

1 Like

I remember that! So sad to know how many observations are stored in phone memory of those “white-circle” people. Still it doesn’t show that median user has 0 everithing if half of all users do have observations.

I’m curious as to how many of those 0-0 users are actually spam users. I’ve introduced iNat to people with whom it didn’t “stick” but every one of them uploaded at least once… I’d think that more than half of random new users do so…

1 Like

I know that some people can have blank accounts for years and then start posting, but some never do.

also curious whether some of those accounts are made by data users who otherwise don’t engage with the core iNat functions (obs/ID)…

3 Likes

I expect many of these permanent inactives will be accounts whose passwords were forgotten, or the user simply got a new phone. I wish there was a mechanism to expire these after, say, 5 years. That’s more than realistic.

2 Likes

Yes, it was suggested in another thread.

US army be like:

ezgif.com-gif-maker

Love the meme! My inner birder wishes it was a bald eagle though. It is Haliaeetus so close.

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.