You start with a wrong idea, I have lots of song-only observations on iNat, what doesn’t let others to upload audio too? Birds on iNat are reviewed by many people always, there’re just too many birders vs. other creatures’ lovers.
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I don’t understand what you’re saying. It sounds like you’re agreeing with me and disagreeing with the poster. Photoless observations make sense to be casual, as there isn’t evidence of the sighting. Is that what you’re saying? Fluffyinca removed the con from the original post, so everything is fine.
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Thank you, @fffffffff, I was about to say the same. On average, I get more than half of all my species by ear when I’m birding. Sounds are media. I have 100+ audio records in iNat - for birds, mammals and amphibians.
As for “questionable” [sic] approval processes…every record with media in iNat is subject to verification and is accessible to any other user. Unless an eBird checklist entry is flagged by a system filter, no evidence is required…so there’s a good chance most checklists will never be vetted.
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I am saying that observations with no media at all – neither picture nor sound – are indistinguishable from fiction. I could theoretically post a Bigfoot observation (with a placeholder since it has no recognized taxonomic name), with no picture or sound. Who would believe that I actually observed Bigfoot?
I already said I agree… Why are you saying the same thing again…?
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These two databases have different purposes. No one would suggest that ebird is the place to post individual bird sightings you made that you thought were interesting or you got a good photo. iNat is great for that.
But I don’t think you should post 2346 records of Snow Goose on iNat because that’s how many you saw in a flock. But eBird is the perfect place to amass that kind of data.
Nor is iNat good for posting all the species you saw on your walk in the woods. iNat requires vouchers. eBird is intended to gather that kind of en masse data and doesn’t require vouchers (but accepts them if you have them).
Yes, people can post fake stuff on ebird just to be jerks. But having a voucher requisite doesn’t change anything. People could (and do) post stuff on iNat with voucher records from a totally different place or time. We find people on iNat every day who are posting “voucher photos” they found in a google image search. Some are doing it to show what the thing they saw looked like, others are doing it to deliberately create fake records.
A vouchered record can just as easily be fiction. So all we have to rely on is the integrity of the person posting it.
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It is less likely to be, because of the added work to make/find it. And it’s more easily found and dealt with on iNat through reverse image searching, flags, and DQA votes.
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Is it though? I’m not convinced that there are more fake records in eBird than on iNat. If I had to guess iNat has more fake records, because there are so many students using it just to get through a class. eBird is really only used by people who know what they’re doing.
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It could certainly be true that iNat has more false records, but the point I’m trying to make is that they’re a lot easier to find. A screenshot observation or location that doesn’t seem right can be a clue, then a reverse image search turns up a copyright violation, and the observation becomes Casual. But on eBird, an entire checklist could be fabricated with old photos or none at all, and there would be no way to prove it.
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They’re far easier to find out, but when a stringer creates a list of common species nobody can check if it’s right or wrong, birding community have a lot of bad eggs, and mostly they’re not changing as people, while students will grow up and can become valuable iNat users with all copyrighted images removed by that time. I bet there’re classes using eBird too, with both platforms all you need is to make active students a focus.
I think there are definitely more ‘fake’ records on eBird than on iNat; not intentionally fake ones, but ‘accidental’ fakes, i.e. innocent misidentifications. How many thousands (tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?) instances are there where someone got a glimpse of a bird, or just a snippet of a call, ID’ed the bird as species A for their list, but it turns out it was actually the super similar species B or C. I’d say there are way way more of these than copyrighted images uploaded to iNat
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Great topic
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Just found a new tool to visualise and explore your personal eBird data. Many cool visuals, including graphs and maps made with your data. Just upload the zip file containing your eBird data download and the software does the rest. Highly recommended!
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That’s a really good point. Just consider the amount of times bird IDs, even with a photo, have to be corrected on iNat. On ebird there is no possibility of correction when there are no photos and nobody will ever know if misidentification occurred. ebird generally does have more birders who are already great at identifying birds, but even they can make a mistake based upon the glimpse of a bird and if someone makes a repeated identification mistake it can go undetected, whereas on iNaturalist the birder will easily be corrected and hopefully not make the mistake again.
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One thing I like about ebird is that when you look at a checklist, the navigation links tell you that the right arrow links to a more recent checklist, and the left arrow to an older one:
Here on iNaturalist, we’ve been asking for similar indicators for years, but it’s still a gamble every time.
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eBird alerts features let users customize preferences for alerts for species of interest or rarity by locations of interest. These alerts can be set so you get them hourly or daily. The alerts contain links to the ebird entries which contain location information.
Another con of eBird: I quickly looked at the home page, was going to make an account to try it out, but didn’t. They make you enter your name. I’m fine with my first name but don’t want to give my last.
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Update: Made an account. Made my first name Ranger. Made my last name Myles. Checking it out!
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A lot of people use shortened versions of their name or a last initial to hide their identity, otherwise you can always be an “Anonymous eBirder” .
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