I am becoming increasingly aware of an apparent invasive species bias in iNaturalist observations, particular those by new(er) users. Though I realize that iNaturalist isn’t a great tool for mapping the abundance of species, I can’t help but notice a number of places where there are more observatio…

oh I thought I had remembered there being a pink exclamation point by the eastern gray squirrel but no it appears I was wrong whoops

those are based on community curated establishment means criteria so that may have just been changed.

Actually I have more of the opposite opinion, I don’t think there is enough records of invasive species compared to natives which I think is crucial for removal. This could just be pertaining to my county because I mainly focus on this area exclusively unless I’m traveling. In fact, I’m doing as muc…

Have you looked at whether native plants are better represented among the unidentified or incorrectly identified plants? Certainly iNat’s CV tool is more likely to suggest an invasive species ID because invasive plants are much more common in the world as a whole. The CV mostly ignores location in o…

It is possible that many users actually do not go on an excursion in wild areas but usually record organisms in cities and in their very anthropized surrounding areas where wild aliens are abundant. Many of these species would probably fall in the classes of casual or naturalized species, some othe…

I agree with you completely. Most of the central and north Jersey’s forests are in a sad state with regard to invasive plant species, and much of our wetlands and brackish marshes have been taken over by Phragmites. These are what’s readily available to make observations of, and it shows! When I ex…

Here is my experience, I think the evolution is similar for many newcomers: when I started with inat (and didn’t know much about nature) I would observe plants that are the most noticeable around me: ‘Oh I see that one all the time, I wonder what it is?’. Of course most of those plants that are n…

That’s interesting. There’s a large group associated with the NY NJ Trail Conference that does invasive removal around the lower Hudson region, and my understanding is that they recently (last year?) started encouraging their members to track invasives using iNat. The organizer of that group lives…

I haven’t seen that particular bias, but I have seem some unusual upload biases develop. Trying to be conscious of that and make my uploads as unpredictable as possible lol. In my area, Pink Lady’s Slippers are well known as a sensitive species that you should not pick. More a general rule about na…

Love seeing news like that. I don’t know who uses my data, but I pray someone like that finds it and uses it someday.

Invasive Species Bias

Nature Talk

jasonhernandez74 October 3, 2020, 4:32am 38

I touched on that in this post: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/not-an-unbiased-dataset/16800/35

Topic		Replies	Views
Not an unbiased dataset General	36	4000	October 4, 2020
Biases in iNat data General	88	8390	July 15, 2021
Improving Data Quality General	33	1415	June 13, 2022
Using iNat for invasive species monitoring? General	34	5879	November 20, 2019
Can we ask observers to pull invasive species? General	34	2294	June 23, 2022

Invasive Species Bias

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