Is it acceptable to create a second account for things that I did not observe myself?

General
21

Just to be clear, that particular account was finally suspended by the site owners (for issues unrelated to being a bulk entry account). It’s still not something the site really wants to see done. Class accounts for students under 13 seem to be the one place that they most commonly pop up, but even then they can cause issues such as when one student continues to post objectionable content or display inappropriate behaviour etc, you pretty much have no options for resolving the issue).

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22

I see. I can’t say that I’m sad to see it go. The majority of its observations for the area I live in were totally useless. I’d much rather spend time writing feedback and corrections for individual accounts.

I still think I agree more with @bouteloua in that the image will become available as if licensed by the uploader, whereas the copyright belongs with the creator.

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23

The main purpose of iNat is to build a community, and while it’s great you’re helping others, photos posted to iNaturalist should represent your own experience. So I would say definitely do not use a second account for this purpose. Encourage them to join iNat or, if they don’t want to do that, there are a ton of Facebook groups and people on Twitter (yes, those platforms have their downsides) that are great for IDs. And yes, there is also the fact that photos and observations are only credited to the owner of the account.

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24

Would Questa game allow that ???

25

They are banned.

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26

If you are hired by the federal govenment to do surveys for mammals, whereby you can only use “your observations and data”, camera traps are legally fine and there is no issue. Obviously we are not talking legality here, but this is the closest we have to an official precedent. Not to mention, you set up the camera, you pressed the buttons – these are “your photos” and you have the right to post them as your observations, even if you did not see them with your eyes. This backs on to the telescope debate too – if you only saw something through a telescope, did you really see it? Yes, you did.

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27

This is a great original question and lots of good responses. I have pondered this quite a bit myself.

I will admit that I have uploaded a couple of photos to my own account that were not my photos or observations. In each case I did so because I desperately wanted that observation to be on iNaturalist, I requested the observer to create an account and upload and they declined and told me I had permission to post it on their behalf. I’m glad to know about the “Second-hand observation” and “Original observer” fields. I will have to go back and add those to my second hand obs.

28

What about the case one gets specimen sent by another person? I want to contribute to the ‘encounter between an observer and an organism’ but it was not me who found it. I know the date and the location, I am providing the photos, so no copyright issues, and I am taking care of the determination (also within iNat by help of other users). But these observations do not belong into my account, I don’t want them on my species list and I did nothing to find them and the location I ‘encountered’ them is not where they have been found. A second account would give the opportunity to get the data into iNat

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29

A specimen sent by another should be marked as captive. The current location for it is fine. You would need a second account for it to not add automatically to your life list. You might be able to edit them out of a life list and just use one account.

30

I would be against this. iNat is not a data repository, it is a community that generates data.

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31

Encouraging the sender to open an account would achieve that result too

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32

Only if encouraging would be successful. And there exist these kind of people you know they would never do that

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33

And therefore there exists the kind of data that will never make it to iNat?

There are a lot of plants in the world that don’t get added to iNat, it is not the end of the world if that happens!

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34

There are no copyright issues if the photo is yours.

35

There have been other discussion threads about specimen-based observations on iNaturalist:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/correcting-research-grade-requirements-for-collected-specimens/782
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/curators-recent-evidence-of-organism-issues/1650
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/museum-herbarium-collection-digitisation-on-inaturalist-yes-or-no/5374

In previous discussion, there seems to be some consensus that specimens (and not necessarily always one’s own) as observation records are OK as long as the location and date match the original field location and date of the specimen. Marking such observations as captive would only be appropriate if they were captive in their original location.

This does raise the question of what difference there is between an observation based on a museum specimen collected by someone else, versus on a photograph “collected” by someone else. But that would be a question to take up in one of these other threads…

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36

I was going by https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#captive not forum consensus. But it depends how you interpret “your museum/herbarium specimens”.

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37

I think the relevant part from that Help section (emphasis added by me) would be

Captive / cultivated (planted)

  • butterfly mounted in a display case and not appropriately marked with date and location of original collection

EDIT: yes, now I also see

Wild / naturalized

  • your museum/herbarium specimens that are appropriately marked with date and location of original collection

There is a gray area in ownership between those two examples. To me, “your” would imply ownership, but not necessarily as the original collector.

39

Like I said, I can see both sides of it though.

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40

…and ‘people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature’

If the person sending specimens is not even interested in what’s the exact ID of the specimen, and if there is a bunch of species that would be new to the state or country, why not sharing those information on iNat?

With that sentence you can end most of the discussions here in the forum. If New Zealand loses its biodiversity due to introduced species, it is also not the end of the world. Still not desirable. Where do you draw the line? And shouldn’t minor issues not also have the right to be discussed here?

Did you read beyond my first sentence?

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41

Somewhere between losing all of New Zealands biodiversity and not getting that one observation into iNat. I’m just not sure where along that spectrum though. Someone else in the forum may be able to help you with that one!

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