iNaturalist vs eBird

General
21

I abhor ebird honestly.

When I was in college, they introduced us to ebird and one of our assignments was to make an account and add, I think it was 20 observations. Most students just made up sightings and got there free marks. Then never used there accounts again. Fake data like this is not good for the overall scientific data of observations.

Other things I very much dislike about it;

  • You can add any observations without pictures and or sound. Which means anybody can post whatever they want, whether it’s true or not. Unlike Inat, you have to have proof.

One problem with this is… And i’m going to use a student I knew in college as an example. This dude, had literally no photos of anything. No proof of anything. Yet our ornithology prof loved this dude. So much he hired him to host night labs.

This dude would post on ebird and according to his ebird, he’s seen literally everything in the country on a repeated bases.

I am willing to bet he’s not seen everything and that 99% of his ebird is fake. For the sake of using it to impress the right people .

People can do this because they do not need proof of anything. At all.

Another reason I dislike it is because, again. You can post without proof. I have seen loads of birds reported on there by people in places those birds are not and would never be at because it’s the wrong habitat.

I am assuming this is because a persons bird sounds ID is not as good as they probably think it is and get birds confused and therefore post something they did not actually hear.

Red Breasted Nuthatch vs. White Breasted Nuthatch for example.

Another reason I dislike it is because of the lack of pictures and sound. I happen to like pictures and sounds and seeing peoples contributions.

And lastly, The interface and overall usability just sucks. For lack of a better term. I just absolutely loath the way the website looks, feels and operates. The few times I’ve used it. I had absolutely no idea how to use the site. Not effectively anyway. I just gave up. For all these reasons.

Inat is just better on every single aspect that I honestly have had no real desire to ever go back to it.

The only thing I have posted on there since college was a very rare Plumbeous Vireo I photographed which was only the third ever recorded in Canada and the only one to have a picture to prove it.

And the only reason I did this is because for whatever reason I wanted to see if anybody on there has seen one and found that some dude was trying to steal my observation and take credit for it and that credit was mine. So I posted it there.

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22

I appreciate that. My point in that context was not that no one could conceivably prefer using iNat, but that as someone who knows ALOT of birders offline (through about a dozen or so bird-related organizations that I have been involved with), I have found very few use iNat and pretty much all use eBird. This can be confirmed, first of all, by the relative sparsity of observers in my area compared with the number I know and see active daily on eBird. Also, those that do post bird observations on iNat only include a tiny fraction of the observations they make (again, which I can confirm through looking at their eBird lists). If I want a sense of what birds are where and when, I find eBird is much more reliable (in addition to having the other features I mentioned).

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23

I do wonder what percent of the ebird records are from locals vs.visitors making a trip and entering into ebird so their life list is complete.

A lot of birders also don’t use cameras, the fact media less records are accepted in ebird and sent to GBIF etc, and relegated to casual on inat is also likely a contributor.

24

I am a birder, but have other interests in nature as well. Rather than maintaining an active ebird account separate from my iNat account where I already post mammal, plant, reptile, fungi, amphibian, etc. observations I find it a lot more convenient to just stay up to date on iNaturalist as far as my own observations are concerned. That said, I have an ebird account. I really enjoy getting the rare bird alerts via email every night and finding birding hotspots via ebird can be easier, as there are far more birders using ebird than there are using iNat. I personally, however, find iNat to be a lot more user friendly and I really like the fact that photo or audio documentation is needed in order for an observation to be research grade. It gives me a good goal and I enjoy the documentation even though I don’t consider myself a good photographer. I can understand how a count of individuals on ebird can be better for research and is something a lot of birders want to document and I can also understand that a birder can get a good look at a bird without getting photo documentation and wants to make note of it publicly still. I much prefer to look through birders photos on iNaturalist than to read through lists, though. It’s just more appealing. I also really enjoy IDing birds on iNat. It’s a lot of fun and I think has potential to make one a better birder. iNat has a lot of ways in which the overall community interaction is better as well, which can also help one improve birding skills. I also enjoy the map features of iNat more. Rather than grouping things into hotspots you can map the exact location of observations and take big picture looks at the range maps and each individual observation. With all of that said, I have birder friends who are much better birders than I and use neither site, and I have birder friends who only use ebird to document rare sightings, and I am sure there may be excellent birders who have never heard of iNat or ebird (although I kind of doubt they haven’t heard of ebird).

The examples jameson_nagle listed above about a class and fake data are things I have not heard of, but do demonstrate how photo or audio documentation can be of importance if we believe there are folks out there just trying to impress people online. I suppose that would be another pro for iNat, although people using copyrighted photos that aren’t their own do occasionally pop up on iNat as well.

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25

As a birder who actually started with iNat my relationship with the two sites has changed significantly over time.

At first I would take pictures of literally everything, upload everything to iNaturalist, and eBird all the birds I saw. As I got more into birding, I started taking less pictures of the more common birds while still taking pictures of many other things for iNat.

Of course whenever I visit some place new I revert back to my original phase but that’s because of a simple lack of familiarity with the flora and fauna of that new place

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26

I have just starting using eBird a month ago. Others mentioned reasons I would second, but I’ll add these here.

I like the community aspect, which, if it’s on eBird I haven’t found it yet. Here I can ask someone why they’ve concluded an ID that I can’t figure out, for example.

On eBird, I like the more detailed species info (vs embedded Wikipedia article here) that helps me make IDs. I also like the page where you can explore orders and families by photo and name. This really helps me learn about birds and narrow down species I am not yet familiar with. I suppose the AI interface on upload with iNat kind of does this. I do use that, but I am more partial to the guidebook-like orders and families interface eBird has.

I wish eBird had photos labeled in more detail, like subspecies and male/female/juvenile. There are at least some labels at that greater level of detail on iNat.

I actually have not uploaded anything to eBird yet or used the lists.

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27

I have a bird life list of slightly more than 1,500 species and I keep other lists in some circumstances but eBird came along at a time when my life got complicated and very busy and I had to set aside hardcore birding (and some other things). I never got into eBird, although I will probably start using it as life settles down. It comes from a different culture than iNat. Birders and lists have a long history built on a sense of community and trust that is kind of beautiful and probably hard to understand for folks who haven’t spent a lot of time around serious birders. Within birding culture, learning is all about hands on mentoring in the field and trial and error. eBird is a digital implementation of an analogue culture.

iNaturalist is a different model and a different culture. The whole thing is built around digital culture and the use of images is central to its ability to harness experienced, knowledgeable specialists to assist less accomplished folks to learn and contribute. It more or less assumes collaboration at a distance. I will probably end up using both a lot more if I ever retire.

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28

I used to agree about the mapping function, but either I got better at using eBird’s or they improved it. For me, iNat and eBird have comparable mapping and each has features I wish the other had.

Although Hotspots are used on eBird for ease, there’s no reason one needs to use them and when it matters, people don’t. I look at county lists and a large number of people use either very specific locations that they make, or give coordinates in their lists. The site has also been encouraging people to use the app which can be used to “track” one’s birding excursion. Personally, I am no more specific about location when I post on iNat than when I use eBird. Not only do birds move from a particular location further and faster than a lot of other taxa, but many of my observations are of birds actually in flight or seen at a considerable distance. Exact location (within 100 m or so) is not terribly interesting unless it is a rare bird that has become a temporary resident and in that case that bird usually ends up with a “stakeout” hotspot location on eBird.

For most birds, what is more interesting is which species move into or through an area and when. When looking up species on eBird the markers will help me instantly distinguish between recent sightings in the last 30 days (red) and older sightings (blue). I also have the problem on iNat of locations being “hidden” behind others nearby or at least difficult to click on without finagling magnification. By making it easy for people (somewhat) to group into Hotspots, I find it quicker to get to sightings on eBird in a very specific location. Also, if you compare the range of a bird like the Lesser Nighthawk in California using the species map of each, you get much less of an accurate representation of it on iNat than on eBird simply because there are more observations collected on eBird. Because this species is so relatively rare (and even rarer to capture its image or sound), photos and recordings are few and far between. Nevertheless, eBird does require that rare birds observations are supported by media or by a detailed description/explanation of the sighting. eBird reviewers vary in their expertise and diligence, but for the most part are good gatekeepers of wrong IDs of rare birds.

That said, I do like that the photos attached to observations in iNat come up somewhat automatically. Overall, eBird feels more intuitive for me in its UX but I think that is partly because I use it a little more often. As I mentioned before, each site has functions I wish the other had.

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29

There’re lot of stringers, they where before eBird, but allowing records without photos be as good as those with photos means such people can do whatever they want.

30

That’s a very good point, you’re absolutely right. It does significantly reduce the degree of difference between the two platforms. But the difference remains. Taking an example from my recent observations: the Ruddy Pigeon, a not uncommon species with a very wide range across Latin America. On iNat, it has 179 observations, 130 of which have photos and 6 with sounds. The majority of these come from parts of Costa Rica, Colombia and Ecuador, representing a rather small portion of its actual range.
Meanwhile, on eBird, it has over 34000 observations, including 572 with photos and 300 with sounds. As others pointed out, there are undoubtedly a number of these that are incorrectly IDed, but if you put them all together, the observations do map very well over the species’ actual range.

As for foreigners vs locals, I’ve no idea what the ratio actually is in terms of observations, but most of the local birding guides use ebird and they report what they see year round, with or without clients, and the number of local users is definitely growing!

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31

I use both iNat and eBird. I started using eBird in Dec 2019 and iNat in Jun 2020. I love both of them. I upload all my bird photos to both iNat and eBird and use eBird to keep my checklists and my life list. I think the eBird webpage is great, and the app is improving. iNat also has a great webpage and app, and also allows users to interact via the platform. My only problem with iNat is that any observation with no photo or other documentation automatically becomes casual. When I am out in the field, and I see a Carolina Wren calling from deep in some bushes, I will put it in eBird and keep walking. Afterward though, I won’t submit it to iNat simply because it won’t be verifiable. As Quality Control, eBird has reviewers while iNat relies on the community and the data quality section.

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32

That classroom thing sounds awful. eBird should be used by serious birders who know what they are looking at, it is not a very good teaching tool (unlike iNat).

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33

Just toggle on the GBIF layer, which is off by default. It collects ebird and many other sources.

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34

this is an interesting point – that the platforms are coming from different cultures.
The lack of a community aspect online on eBird might be misleading, because if you’re birding locally in a certain area you will tend to run into other birders at big hotspots, and you’ll recognize each other from eBird (“hey are you so-and-so?”), and can quickly form a community.
I like both iNat and eBird, but, as others have said, the Hotspot and bar chart features of eBird are very useful for finding new places to bird/explore, especially if you’re new to an area. Can be cumbersome searching species by species for some similar ideas on iNat. Also eBird is great for searching a library of audio recordings by species & region.
Both are good for different things! :)

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35

The reality is this, and I say it as someone who loves them some iNat.

If you are just a birder, in particular one who already uses Ebird, there are no real compelling reasons to stop. Yes, there are a few things in iNat that are different or even better, but accessing them is not worth the pain and difficulty of losing access to your history (or trying to recreate it), your lists and the email alerts.

The same holds true for getting folks over from other nationally oriented established biodiversity platforms.

36

I have nothing to add about eBird, but welcome to the Forum. It’s always an interesting place.

37

one of the eBird functions that doesn’t exist in iNaturalist is sharing of lists. if they ever develop functionality in iNaturalist to share observations between multiple users, it might be interesting to develop a grade of observations that represents observations without media that were confirmed by at least 2 people in the field – not quite research grade because no one else can challenge, but better than just one person saying they saw something. (maybe to achieve this new grade, the observation would also require some sort of text description of what was seen to supplement the location and time data.)

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38

Not that it appears to be going anywhere, but you can chime in on this here
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/share-observations-between-users/337

39

I saw recently when observations are duplicated you see “linked observations” to it, so maybe it will evolve to “duplicating” observation for another person.
By the way, look at observations’ numbers rising on iNat, it’s much younger so it has less, but just look, each year is thousands of new reports of each species, iNat is not as advertised in birding community, that’s why not so many switch platforms, not because each birder adores day lists.

40

They serve different purposes. But where they overlap, I find iNaturalist much preferable in almost every way. You can tell which platform was started by Ivy League scientists and which was started as a California computer science master’s project. For example:

  • iNat allows anyone to comment on and suggest ID’s for observations. eBird restricts that ability to specially selected reviewers, and even then they are restricted to emailing. As one of those reviewers for eBird it is still harder and less effective for me to make corrections to eBird observations than to make corrections on iNaturalist as just a regular user.
  • The search tools on iNat are a thousand times more powerful and configurable than on eBird. If you actually want to do anything with eBird data, you have to manually send in a request or use GBIF.
  • iNat allows you to set your photos to have various Creative Common licensing, so that they can be useful for anyone’s purposes. The iNat license agreement is pretty reasonable and does not give them a ton of power to use photos that you haven’t specifically licensed. eBird does not allow you to share your photos with a Creative Commons license, but has an extremely broad licence agreement that basically means they can do whatever they want with your photos. Puts a bad taste in my mouth. They even do a stupid Javascript(?) thing where you can’t easily right-click on photos to zoom in.
  • eBird seems to have a weird resistance to giving people power over their own observations. Rather than just giving users the ability to flip a toggle “don’t count this observation on my lists”, they are developing some sophisticated top-down method of dealing with introduced species. The result is that oodles of valuable data about introduced species are lost because there still (19 years in) isn’t any way to report them without it counting on birder’s lists.

Don’t get me wrong, I love eBird and use it almost every day. But I really wish they took a lesson from iNat and didn’t try to control every last little thing.

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