I do a lot of work with anuran vocalizations in the SE USA. While I’d consider myself pretty good with recognizing anuran calls, of course I get stumped on one from time to time. Does anyone know of a good group of people who have that particular skill set, for times where we need a second (or third) opinion? Random facebook herp groups are ok - and sometimes quite helpful - but it would be nice to have a resource for vocalizations specifically.
Why not start a project here of Anuran vocalizations ?
I would be interested in such a project - especially since I am not on beta meta whatever thingies 
and source my social media fix here.
I haven’t ever started a project on iNat, so maybe I am misunderstanding how it works. But what I’m after is a group of people where you can post an audio clip and ask for clarification of species ID. I’m not necessarily interested in recording an observation of the unknown on iNat (and sometimes specifically do not want to).
It would also be nice to have people who can comment on (e.g.) new training recordings they may come across, software for call ID, acoustic ecology topics.
It’s kind of a niche interest, I’ll grant you.
I think a project could help with some, but not all, of those things. Projects are useful in that they group observations together to make them easy to find. Once identifiers know that they can check on observations in a project to employ their expertise, they often come back, and users can sort of naturally coalesce around a shared identification interest.
The admins of a project can also make posts around topics that interest them like software, acoustic ecology, whatever other topics you might want. A caveat here is that posts like these often don’t get a wide audience.
However, if users join the project they can be notified of posts, and this also can give you a list of frequent IDers that it could be useful to mention and call in for help.
But projects are centered around iNat observations, so you would need observations to make that happen. If you’re really just looking for a discussion forum, that would probably be outside iNat, though maybe iNat users are already part of some that they could recommend.
3 Likes
I understand.
On inat you can post unidentified anurans observations - and I guess people who are interested will help id them.
Not always will there be a discussion
I just filtered anura and sounds and this is the result
OBSERVATIONS 39,742 (to reiterate only observations including sound)
SPECIES 983
seems to me that the community of people posting sounds is quite decent - close to 10000 observers.
Maybe you can write to the most active (via the direct messaging service) and ask them directly too.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.