“Why do you think iNaturalist succeeded where so many similar platforms around the world failed, or at least, those platforms didn’t gain the same traction as iNaturalist?”
Why has iNaturalist become the dominant platform of its type? (eBird notwithstanding)
Was it the timing, because it launched in the late 2000s, when smartphones and social media were gaining traction? Was it the democratic approach, where all IDs are equally valid, with no special power given to authorities? What was the “secret sauce” in iNaturalist?
I think, at least for use in insect data collection, it’s the Community ID. One trade-off that all similar platforms have had is the expert-identification vs. ease of uploading records.
For example, BAMONA is an excellent resource for collecting North American moth and butterfly records, but every record must be individually “verified” by a designated reviewer, so there’s a bit of a bottleneck in many geographic regions, as uploads happen faster than the limited reviewers can deal with them. It’s very patchy which areas of the country have fairly complete species lists (my state of PA is in great shape thanks to an awesome reviewer!) vs areas with very spotty lists. But the advantage is that misidentifications (in areas with good reviewers) are kept to a minimum.
By contrast, BugGuide has no real “expert review” process. Anyone can post any photo as any species, and they’re immediately pictured alongside all the other pictures with no “research grade” vs. “needs ID” designation. Misidentifications in some taxa are rampant, and there’s no way to tell if a photo was ID’d by someone with expertise or just posted by someone with no experience as a complete guess.
It’s impossible to have a platform that both allows for easy uploads by all users making educated guesses about IDs and also minimizes misidentifications via expert review, but iNat has gotten the closest to this ideal, IMO. The CID gives a way to distinguish between records that have and haven’t been reviewed and given a “Second Opinion”, while still allowing everyone to easily upload all their records straight to the site with whatever ID they think it should have. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best compromise to date. It’s democratic in the sense that everyone can be a reviewer/identifier, but it still has a way to filter out records whose IDs are based on just one person’s guess. There will of course sometimes be cases where a knowledgeable expert gets incorrectly “outvoted” by less knowledgeable users who fail to change their mistaken IDs, but this seems to be pretty rare, in my experience. In general, crowdsourcing is a good way for IDs to eventually trend toward being correct. (I’ve often wanted to see someone research the percent of correct IDs vs. age of observations for a tough group of organisms on iNat… I suspect that while newly posted records may be misidentified, there is probably an observation age by which someone knowledgeable will have likely corrected mistakes, so older observations may be likelier to be correctly identified. Or do older obs have more misidentifications because the CV was worse back when they were posted? Has anyone tested this?)
I just wanted to give you a heads-up that this topic is starting to drift a bit from the original title.
The moderators might be about to split it into a separate thread. Just wanted to let you know, so you have the option of doing it yourself, if you want to!
The fact that iNat covers all organisms allows it to be a “one-stop shopping” place for those who photo just one taxonomic group or many. I focus mainly on vertebrates but if I see interesting plants or invertebrates I’ll photo them as well. All can be submitted to iNat.
Hi everyone, while there are certainly a bunch of platforms that have waxed and waned over the years, iNat isn’t the only successful and global platform offering full taxonomic and geographic coverage. Have a look at what’s being shared by iNat and Observation.org with GBIF. The former has a stronghold in North America for obvious reasons, while Observation is very popular in Europe.
Both are actually quite similar in several ways, though each with its own strength and weakness.
Not really aware of similar platforms failing. But I think the main reasons for iNat’s success are (1) ease of uploading multiple observations (other sites have a tedious one at a time process), (2) access to expert and knowledgeable identifiers from around the globe (e.g. experts from South America can ID stuff seen in New Jersey), (3) ability to tag other experts when an ID within their expertise comes into question, (4) universal coverage–you can submit an observation of any taxon observed anywhere, and (5) computer vision making the ID process much less tedious by providing initial suggestions to investigate.
That’s not true. You can tell if an expert has ID’d a bugguide photo in either of two ways–if the photo has been placed in a taxon by someone other than the observer, then an expert has ID’d it because only contributing editors can move others’ observations to a taxon; also, you can just look at the bio of the identifier–if the identifier is designated as a contributing editor, then they have been approved by bugguide’s staff as an expert identifier.
And I will also add I’ve seen many, many more misidentifications on iNat than BugGuide. The vast majority of bugguide observations are ID’d by experts.
As far as plants go PictureThis has really been improving and now people can verify whether an ID is correct or not. Not entirely sure who verifies this though.
I’m not sure I agree that contributing editor = expert identifier… I’m a contributing editor on BugGuide and I wouldn’t trust me to move photos of most taxa on there.
I agree iNat overall probably has more misidentifications, but I’d say iNat’s “Research Grade” obs are probably at least as accurate as BugGuide’s. Again, no one has quantified any of this, so it’s all going off of anecdotes. But for example when I curated the genus Datana last spring, iNat had a very high mis-ID rate among “Needs ID” obs, yet not a lot of “RG” misidentifications, as most users were hesitant to click Agree on IDs in such a tough genus and few obs were in the RG category at all. BugGuide had a pretty high misidentification rate too though, with some of the species pages being more than 50% wrong. So I don’t know how they ultimately compare; this would all be a fascinating research project.
To keep on-topic though, I still think that iNat’s democratization of IDs is a good thing overall. When I place a photo on BugGuide, it’s immediately moved to whatever I call it, while on iNat I (at least ideally) need to go through the process of convincing other users that my ID is correct before they will change theirs. I find myself having to explain my IDs more on iNat, which is good for everyone involved in the process.
I just watched the webinar on YouTube (which I enjoyed) and it struck me that the level of outreach and engagement by iNat staff and many volunteer iNatters is what makes the site exceptional. I haven’t used that many other sites with similar missions so can’t say it’s unique in this regard but iNat does seem more focused on involvement and more open to individualistic uses of the site.
BugGuide’s user interface is pretty dated, too. And uploading photos to BugGuide takes significantly longer than it does on iNat. That’s going to limit overall growth, especially in the point, shoot and upload age of photography.
I’ll just pop in here to agree that the easy and quick method for uploading photos on the web or apps draws a lot of people in from BugGuide, at least.
I can’t of course speak to your experience, but that is not the experience of myself or most users. Anytime I post a photo to the ID section of bugguide, an expert evaluates it and places it in the appropriate section; my suggestion (based on my own knowledge or computer vision) not uncommonly turns out to be incorrect and the expert corrects it.
Let’s please refocus on the original question. A comparison between iNat and other platforms like BugGuide is fine, but discussions specific to other platforms should be in a separate topic.
AS jnstuart already mentioned, the platforms that disappeared in Europe are the ones with focus on only Butterflies, dragonflies, herps and so on. An observer wants “one-stop shopping” and one portal to put all his observations in. Observation.org was popular because of the one-stop.
I forgot to tell, but Observation.org only had Computer Vision for Android apps and iNaturalist had also Computer Vision for iPhone. Because of this feature iNaturalist became well known in Europe.
your point about Community ID!