Agreed, the taxonomic backbone along with geographic and date organization of the site are very useful. It allows an iNatter to search their pics by taxon or place or date, which is great for me as iNat functions as my photo organizer. (My original photos are archived elsewhere but only by date.)
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- The fabulous Computer Vision system
- The fantastic community of identifiers
- The addictive quality once you get going
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I don’t have experience with other sites, I’ll just list my take on why is iNat successful
#1 The contributors. I had a lot of help when I started, people were very patient. I found everyone to be polite, even during robust disagreements.
#2 The moderators (I understand they are also contributors). The oversight is just right. Enforcing arbitrary rules to the letter would chase people away and letting it go would deteriorate the site to shouting matches or worse.
Anything goes as long as it is done in good faith: bad or mixed up photos, wrong IDs, off topic or factually incorrect comments. Somehow it all gets sorted or buried.
#3 Robust multi-platform application, Excellent data design and user interface (I only use the browser based app) and powerful search capabilities across geo location and the taxonomic hierarchy.
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INat is the only such database I use (I do have a Merlin account and occasionally upload checklists, but for me at least, that is rather different). Im not therefore in a position to make comparisons, but can say what I appreciate about iNat.
● I guess it must have been pretty easy to find. It was the first place I stumbled upon when I had an unidentified lifeform that I wanted to know about. This must apply to many others because I’ve since had other non-naturalists (I didn’t consider myself a naturalist when I came here) recommend the site to me not knowing that I’m here every day.
● Ease of uploading observations. Particularly that I can either upload a whole batch from a field trip via my computer or just an individual shot via my phone of something I’ve stumbled across.
● The number of experts on the site and the responsiveness and helpfulness of everyone here.
● The structure of the site as well as its general look and feel. It is easy to use and importantly is a pleasant experience.
● The ability to sort and filter my observations in different ways very easily.
● The ability to look at places where I am going and get an idea of what I might see.
For these reasons and more, I love iNat. There is no way I could replicate it, or even come close, as a way of organising my observations. I wish you every success in the future. Thank you so much for your great work!
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I think this is very much a “YMMV” scenario. In my experience, BAMONA is terrible. The upload process is exceedingly slow/laborious/tedious, and the quality of the verifiers can vary greatly. Even if the verifier is reasonably competent, you’re still stuck with one person’s opinion on the correct ID. If you disagree, you can flag an observation as misidentified, but the verifier can simply ignore your appeal. And it gets WORSE! Once a verifier retires and someone else takes over, the new verifier cannot go back and correct the errors of their predecessor (so I’ve heard from someone who recently took over as verifier for my region). There are a whole bunch of other issues with the interface which are problematic, and there’s essentially no fixes in the works for any of it. It’s a sort of “what you see is what you get, don’t expect any improvements going forward”.
The biggest problem is that BAMONA is essentially a black whole for the data. It’s tough to get the data in, but it’s near impossible to get it out. In the past, our regional verifier was getting observation data from BAMONA for entry into our local Atlas database. I believe he somehow badgered BAMONA into sending him a summary spreadsheet of the data submitted each year (I have a copy of one of the “raw” spreadsheets that was sent to him). I am now managing our local Atlas database, and I’m trying to verify that the BAMONA data was correctly transcribed. There’s information in BAMONA that they don’t display on the website (specifically, “location notes”). There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for requesting this data unless you’re a verifier, and even then, you probably have to strong arm BAMONA to get it (ie. threaten to quit if you don’t get what you want).
The BAMONA design may leave much to be desired, but at least it works predictably. It doesn’t appear to be bug ridden, the way eButterfly is.
Having experience with both the “dedicated verifier” and “community ID” models, I think community ID is far superior, as long as the whole comment/notification/tagging works properly (as it does for the most part with iNat). On iNat, IDs can be discussed, and incorrect IDs overturned. Not only does this improve the overall quality of the data, but it also affords important learning opportunities for observers. Inexperienced observers can see how IDs are arrived at by seeing them hashed out before their eyes. On BAMONA, they never see “the little man behind the curtain”, unless he deigns to contact them directly.
eButterfly tried to implement a community ID system similar to iNat’s, but unfortunately they cut corners and didn’t think through the notification process. The result is almost completely useless as it does not foster the kind of “live” discussion that we see here on iNat. It’s almost impossible to keep track of discussions unless you actively work at keeping tabs on individual observations (which is impossible for a verifier to is interacting with hundreds/thousands of observations).
iNat is very definitely a work in progress, so even if you feel that something hasn’t been implemented as well as it could have been, you can have some hope of future improvements. Other platforms give the impression of being cast in stone (or worse, what few “improvements” they do deploy bring a host of new bugs for you to contend with).
I have limited experience with BugGuide. I have seen (and tried to correct) some misidentifications I’ve seen there, but it reminds me a lot of BAMONA in terms of being very “clunky” and unresponsive. I don’t know the whole history, but it’s curious that (as far as I can tell) no one involved with our regional database has ever tried to import observation data from BugGuide. Perhaps there’s no mechanism for bulk export of observations. If that’s so, then BugGuide suffers from the same problem as BAMONA - it’s where observation data goes to die.
Several people have commented that one of the big advantages of iNat is that there are lots of experts on the platform. If true, then one should ask why that should be the case - it’s not like iNat hires them. I suspect that it is at least partly because of some of the factors I’ve listed above. As someone who does a lot of verification, I can say that the iNat is best (though by no means perfect) when it comes to making the job of verification easier. It allows me to interact with the data to improve it, and then make use of it. I don’t get that from the other platforms I’ve interacted with. Unfortunately, I’m so busy doing that verification on iNat that I have no time to check out newer platforms that may have come out in the past few years. My only other experience is with older (some might say archaic) platforms like BAMONA, eButterfly, and to a very limited extent, BugGuide.
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I think the reason I had a somewhat better experience with BAMONA was that our state’s verifier has had open discussion with me and a group of fellow moth enthusiasts via and email chain for years long before iNat was a thing. So we had discussion about IDs and possible mistakes, and there was an open dialogue about the sightings being uploaded that led to corrections when one of us made a mistake. Even though the sightings all say “verified by ______” on the site, for our state we had a sort of “community” arriving at the “ID” behind the scenes. iNat just formalized and platformed this process to make it easier and more transparent. Most of us from those email convos are on iNat now, and we just moved the same type of discussions here, where they’re now public. As you said, it’s very clear when a BAMONA reviewer is just putting their own IDs on everything with no checks and balances, because the same handful of mis-IDs just keep happening over and over again until there are pages of wrong IDs with no way to easily suggest an alternative. (I’ve mainly found these because I’ll run into a series of similar ID mistakes on iNat with the user comment “verified by BAMONA” as their reasoning for the iNat ID they’ve suggested.)
This brings up another point where I think iNat is superior for the observer. On BugGuide, I’ve moved photos from “Needs ID” (BugGuide’s version of iNat’s “Unknown”) to species pages, and been met with pushback from other Editors (BugGuide’s version of iNat’s Curators) who insist the photo is of poor quality and should therefore be “frassed”. If you’re familiar with iNat and not BugGuide, you may be shocked to find that yes, BugGuide’s equivalent of Curators just delete photos that they don’t feel “add value to the guide”. There’s disagreement about what that means precisely, but usually if a photo is low quality and does not represent a new-for-the-site record for a location or date range, they just trash it- record deleted. It can be perfectly identifiable to genus- or species-level, but BugGuide doesn’t want it on their site. Here’s their “recently deleted” area: https://bugguide.net/node/view/9410/bgimage?from=0 full of images that just didn’t spark enough joy. Reasons given for frassing are things like forgetting to include a date, a species being extralimital to the area observed and so possibly/probably being captive, the photo being out of focus, the species page having too many of that species already, etc. iNat solved this concern in a more nuanced way IMO- the “Casual Grade” observation. An observation not identifiable past a high taxon level, or with data incorrectly entered, or of a likely captive individual can remain on the site indefinitely in case it might still be useful, but it’s not visible without explicitly changing the search parameters to look for Casual obs.
So I’m not surprised databasers looking for records would not pick BugGuide as a top source. It’s sort of right in the name though- it’s a Guide first and a repository for people’s records second. Maybe they have limited server space and want to cut down on how many photos they need to store. Their mission is very different than iNat’s so it’s probably not fair to compare them… but honestly I used to be a fairly active editor on there (~11,000 photos moved), but the “why didn’t you just frass this! it’s useless!” type interactions are 100% why I switched to doing IDs pretty much only on iNat instead these days. If I spend 5 hours providing IDs, I want that work to remain on the site as a record of my IDs, not trashed 30 days later when the frass is emptied.
So I guess add “more than 1 or 2 tiers of data quality to the observations” and “transparency of ID work” to the list of iNat’s special sauce.
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Firstly, for me, is it’s quick and easy to use. A few years ago I was asked to compare a conservation society’s reporting scheme with the UK national scheme and iNat, and the difference in time taken was in the order of 20 mins, 10 mins, 2 mins. Secondly, it’s international. I can record all my sightings in iNat. Thirdly, projects are fairly easy to set up.
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I think these things (along with various others that have been mentioned) all work synergistically. A few (seemingly) minor features that make life easier for one set of iNat users (eg. identifiers) means there’s more of them around and actively engaged, which then enhances the experience of other users (ie. observers), and you end up with a positive feedback loop.
And that can be hell for a competing platform that steadfastly refuses to keep up. Someone might put up with a less satisfying user experience if there are no alternatives, but they’ll jump ship pretty quickly if they find someone else had built a better mouse trap (how’s that for mixing metaphors?).
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For me, iNat’s strongest advantage is that it’s a comfortable learning platform for people of all skill and interest levels. I’ve used a number of other platforms and usually found them a little too aggressive against less knowledgeable users (and, in a few cases, MUCH too aggressive). iNat gives the user an opportunity to, frankly, make mistakes… without being made to feel like an idiot. Personally, it’s helped me to learn a great deal about taxa I would otherwise have not been bold enough to post.
Another excellent example is my friend’s teenage son, who has learning disabilities but is a regular iNat poster… he isn’t put off by getting things wrong and having to correct them. He likes learning that way. Personally, I think that’s iNat’s single most valuable feature (and is also why I don’t take it too seriously when academics complain about having to correct misidentifications or deal with poor quality photos… right or wrong, I see that as a secondary problem).
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I think being everything, everywhere, all at once is what landed me. I was aware of the site several years before I looked deeper into it, and once I did I was hooked, not only from how much info there was but the passion.
I wasnt massively into harvestmen (I was aware of them, but not how diverse they were) before using inat, but a couple specialists on my ID changed that, and now I love harvestmen.
Several times peoples passion has gotten me to fall down another rabbit hole. Passion stokes passion, and there is a lot of passion here.
But its also just so simple to use for lay people. As a visitor centre ranger, I introduce people to inat almost every day. By showing how easy it is to zoom down to our area, and get a feel for what around. Not sure how many people go on to use it, but for showing whats there, and using examples, its perfect.
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No disrespect intended, but iNat has a much better forum than eButterfly. That probably helps.
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A less obvious but valuable factor in making iNaturalist so successful is that discussions are moderated and truly rude and unpleasant commenters can be taught, even silenced if necessary. We are nice people though sometimes clueless or defensive, but every place on the internet gets invaded by bullies sooner or later. While polite discussion isn’t enough to make iNaturalist so successful, I think it’s a necessary, background component of success. Thank you, moderators.
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