A couple of interesting metrics, looking at iNat bird records for Peru, they dropped by almost 50% in 2020 vs. 2019, which is certainly a function of travel restrictions.
I’m not 100% certain when eBird launched, but clearly a great deal many more ‘historical’ records are getting added into eBird when you look at the rate of older records in eBird versus the above:
Note that GBIF does not yet appear to imported the 2020 eBird dataset, while they have done so for iNat, so if you want your records available to GBIF or other quickly, perhaps that is a vote for iNat…
ID: Besides eBird, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has an app called Merlin which can help you with an identification. It even has a feature where you can import a photo and get a ID. There is also a REALLY good app just for wood warblers called “The Warbler Guide” which has things like 3D views that you can rotate. These apps also have song recordings that you can listen to. There are also bird song apps.
No matter where you are, there are really good Facebook Groups to help with this. That’s where birders are networking now. If you don’t like FB, then you can just enter a very simple account with a fake name and little other information. (You don’t have to “sell your soul” as the usual negative response to FB goes.) I know a “Wendy Catbird”. There are multiple groups where other birders are waiting for people to ask for help. There are shorebirds groups, raptor groups, gull groups, warbler groups, rare bird groups, county groups, state groups, country groups, individual park groups, etc, etc. Once you join one group for your area, you will quickly find other groups because that’s where birders network right now.
There are also a countless number of other groups for insects, amphibians, reptiles, fish, butterflies, bees, spiders, plants, trees, animal tracks…anything you can thing of. These groups have people who have specialized knowledge of their favorite subjects. I know of a group that just focuses on tiger beetles.
Finally, there is a group for feedback on eBird for both the website and the app. You can make suggestions that are heard and responded to. People also exchange ideas about how to use the eBird API.
I can tell you that eBird uses local knowledgeable reviewers for the counties in Ohio. And, the birding network here is a very good one that abides by some good rules of honest reporting. There are people who try to cheat with rare birds. And, the reviewers and the communities are aware of them. Any birder has to make a good case for a rare bird sighting if no photo is uploaded. I am sure there are people who cheat on checklists with common species maybe just to get a high number of species on a list. But, the vast majority of birders who are in any way serious about recording sightings are honest about it.
It is a shame you had a such a bad experience with that class. I hope it hasn’t turned you off to birding. It is a wonderful activity with a lot of really good people who are willing to help you enjoy it.
It is a huge disadvantage if you use 20 fields just to save the Number of individuals people will stop using it as it is hard to get the data out of the database again. If you use Five Fields with about 5-15 “List of values” you can store most of it. The search on fields is surprisingly good, no idea if it is efficient on the backbone.
Thanks for your input about the mapping. I have to confess that although on the surface level I do prefer the iNat mapping functions, I have used ebird’s mapping functions much less. I do really like how you can narrow down by month on ebird when searching on the map. Seasonality is something the map filters on iNat are not yet equipped for and should be. And I take your point about hotspots being for ease and not being used by everyone and that exact location is not a particularly important piece of information. Observations stacked on top of each other can be a little difficult to play around with the magnification. I think I’ve probably just gotten used to that on iNaturalist. Honestly, after thinking about your points and all others it really is a matter of personal preference, but if I were to give advice to someone who was not currently on either platform, it would be to try both and see what they like more, and in most situations it’s probably good to have an account on both and use both for the different aspects of them that they are comfortable with.
You can use filters on iNat to show pretty much the same, yes, not in different colours, but filter new observations or observations in particular month, it’s easy to use.
Far from best idea to use single spot for tracks of many kilometres, works for watching from one spot, but not for walking, also no idea why eBird can’t use a circle like iNat it’s so simple and easy.
Sorry to spam here, but AI now already looks at close observations only, you could see it recently.
For second you need good range maps, it’s hard to achieve with so many species, though for those that have one ability to use url like native status=no/false sounds real to get in life?
Target species exists in app, though I won’t say it’s working as good as it could, for me it just started showing zero aims all the time.
UPD. New life list has a good feature of showing which species you miss, globally or for place (though working as before, with full list), all taxa or particular one, it’s cool, though it’s harder to use “in field”.
I have been birding for many years, but mostly only reported rarities to local databases in my home countries - the Czech Republic and in Poland - as both countries have systems that are widely popular locally and were in use long before more than a handful of people in those countries even heard of eBird, so those were the logical places to report, because the reports there are seen by the most people, who can also see the rarity and are also used by local research. The likelihood of me ever entering a large amount of data into eBird is next to zero, because the system is centered about “all that you saw at place X” and I do not keep such logs. So discovering iNat was really nice for me, because the reporting system here corresponds to my casual approach to birding much better - I just pick a series of photos from a trip, dump them into “upload” and then try to locate each individually, or a bunch at once when I can see that the times are near each other. The interface on iNat is really nearly perfect for this operation - I have a few quips with it, especially with the way how it sometimes randomly rearranges the order of the photos and how multiple selection misbehaves when you change the order by drag-n-drop, but these things are minor.
Another aspect is that on iNat, there is still very small birding coverage in many places, so adding observations here feels quite impactful - in the last two days, we have enriched the iNat bird list for Oman by 13 species for example :)
How fabulous is this! I’ve been using iNat for almost six years and have never noticed a reference to a Trips function. This can be used to report absence-of data in iNat. Also: there’s no obvious privacy issue with this, unlike eBird’s deeply-problematic GPS track feature.
One of the (many) reasons I stopped using eBird is the site’s very poor privacy framework. Individual users have no option to protect their personal location from third parties, but reviewers - who hold all the cards in the opaque, rigidly-hierarchical ID process - are anonymous and unreachable unless they contact you.
iNat’s crowd-sourced ID process is accountable and transparent. iNat’s privacy options are controlled by the user and are very granular. Meanwhile, users trying to raise serious personal privacy issues in the eBird community tend to receive responses like this:
If eBird configured itself like iNat, almost all of these issues would be solved. In particular, the (incessant) complaints about overworked gatekeeper-reviewers at eBird could be fixed instantly. Don’t have them. Let the community decide collectively.
To follow up my previous comment, we just brought the iNat birdlist of Kuwait from 112 to 163 using just 10 days of data from our single trip to the country. You aren’t going to get this kind of experience on eBird as too many people use it :)
They are quite different. iNat declares its purpose to be primarily that of encouraging amateur naturalists to record their sightings. EBird is a serious scientific database used by academic ornithologists working on population studies etc. eBird is used extensively by serious citizen-scientist birders as well as professional academics and it is assumed that anyone entering a sighting is able to identify birds with precision, as most are. It is set up so that sightings are flagged and questioned if they are unlikely for a particular location at a particular date and you are expected to provide supporting data for these species. There are local reviewers who will contribute to the weeding process as-well.
Basically - iNat is for the benefit of the user while eBir is for science. Don’t use eBird if you don’t know your species identification.
Sorry but there is nothing wrong with the GPS function in eBird - location of sightings is important scientifically and the tracks etc are there to also collect “effort” which is important for many statistical analyses of data.
As for “let the community decide collectively” I disagree. Reviewers should be experts in their field, not anybody who thinks a butterfly might be X perhaps, as is too often the case. Solid science must come first.
our primary goal in operating iNaturalist is to connect people to nature, and by that we mean getting people to feel that the non-human world has personal significance, and is worth protecting. We have a pretty nerdy way of doing that, of course, but we really believe that recording information about nature in a social context is a tremendous way to understand the awesome depth and breadth of life on Earth.
Our secondary goal is to generate scientifically valuable biodiversity data from these personal encounters. We believe iNat can achieve both of these goals simultaneously - in fact that they reinforce one another
Nowhere is it said that “amateurs” (a word that has different meanings among different groups, in my experience) are the main audience. The goal is for anyone, be they expert, novice, or somewhere in between (and really none of us are experts in everything!), to share and discuss their observations and knowledge with others.
You can argue with its efficacy and implementation, but I think it’s clear that iNat is designed with data quality in mind (media evidence is desired, there is a Data Quality Assessment, civil disagreements and citing of evidence are encouraged, etc), and the data are definitely used in research.
I do agree that the two platforms are different, though, and comparing them is kind of apples and oranges. Personally I love using eBird and think it’s great. But it’s designed primarily for recording and displaying data, whereas (as others have pointed out) iNaturalist focuses more on the social and online interaction side, in addition to making data available for scrutiny and use by anyone. While obviously there are things that can and should be improved on both platforms, I think they’re both good at what they set out to do.
If you say so. Maybe I’m more of a purist than some, but to me, an observation without a photo is just taking someone’s word for it. For all I know, they could have seen something entirely different and mistaken it; or imagined it; or even just made it up. No way to know.
Many birders use bird calls to identify birds, not photos, and it can be quite difficult to get a photo of every bird seen. Today I submitted a survey to eBird after a hike, seeing/hearing 19 species and 110 individuals. This would take much longer to record in iNaturalist, and only the few I got photos of would go into iNat, a big data gap. Biologists who do bird surveys usually do them aurally, less visually. Furthermore, the “approval” process of iNat is questionable. No disrespect to kids, but any 9 year old can approve a photo and it would be research grade on iNat. eBird surveys are reviewed by experts, unlike iNaturalist.
the number of users under 10 years old (or of similar age) is very very low, probably something like 0.001% (if not lower)
any 9 year old can approve a photo → becomes RG is a gross oversimplification of how IDing on iNat works. If a 9 year old adds an ID and it’s correct, then their age is irrelevant. If they’re wrong, they’ll be corrected by someone, and it becomes a learning experience for them too
whilst of course as a broad pattern, the older users get the more experience/knowledge they gain, but I know of many young users, e.g. 14-15 years old, who are hugely knowledgeable in their group of interest, far more so than many older users. Automatically dismissing the knowledge of younger users purely due to age isn’t helpful
“eBird surveys are reviewed by experts” this is a strong misrepresentation of how eBird reviewing works. I can walk down to my local park right now, see no birds, but create a survey and input the top 15 common birds for the area that I would normally see. This data would be completely fabricated, and noone would ever know; it would not be reviewed by an expert. I’ve submitted hundreds of eBird lists, and have only ever received an email from a reviewer on 3 occasions; on each one I had accidentally tapped the wrong option (e.g. picked ‘white-browed’ instead of 'white-breasted) and selected a rarity for an area instead of the common one I meant to pick. For the hundreds of other lists, I could have made up half of that data, but it’s impossible for any reviewer to detect that.
“unlike iNaturalist.” → iNat users include many, many, many experts from around the entire world, including PhDs, researchers, museum curators and literally world experts.
