you can freely identify, interact with and comment on anyone’s observations, exchange messages, mark your favourite observations, join projects, write and read personal or project journals, and more. That’s not something you can do on eg GBIF or WoRMS… and that’s just a start
plus the forum is definitely social networking and I struggle to think of a definition of social networking in which it would not be included
9 Likes
In addition to what trh_blue said, you can “follow” people who’s observations and journal posts that you’d like to see: If you go to someone else’s profile you will see Message and Follow buttons to the right of the person’s iNat name towards the top of the screen. And here’s one example for using the social networking side to arrange group outings. A few “socially active” users in a region can make a really big difference.
4 Likes
All I will add to that is that the top identifier(s) may not always be the best people to tag. I’m top identifier in a number of Canadian moth species, but it does not mean I am completely familiar with the species. I’ll sometimes do a whole bunch of ID’s for one species, and six months later will have forgotten the pertinent markings! My mantra is ‘I’m always ready to help, but I’m not always right’.
1 Like
iNat is social media first. iNat intends to encourage ‘social’ to observe nature.
From that arise the issues biologists can have with data quality. And observers who feel this obs is MINE you may NOT add an ID or leave a comment.
Again - iNat says be kind, presume people mean well.
4 Likes
I have developed relationships (online) with a fair number of people I would like to get to know better. People also help each other out when they can - I got some very informative feedback from a person who is more familiar with dragonflies than me this morning. I’ve been involved with collegial debates about moth ID. I also try to help when I can, and teach what I know. And some folks use the site to organise ‘hunting’ trips - @sambiology and @gcwarbler would know about this better than me. So yes, there is a social aspect, and it constitutes a network. It’s not abrasive, so perhaps it doesn’t fit the common ‘social networking’ concept.
3 Likes
There is rarely a flame war and as good as no conspiracy theories, so how can it be social??? 
6 Likes
Are you sure about conspiracy? 
2 Likes
Well, no observations yet of Walckenaeria extraterrestris??? That can’t be coincidence, someone is hiding them from us. But that’s not a theory of mine of course, it’s just a plain conspiracy!
2 Likes
I love this idea and generally pay it forward in life wherever I can. I have 201 observations and have made 5,153 IDs. I get nothing on even the most basic fungi and plants and bugs. Are unidentified observations used for anything? I will say most of my IDs are for birds (my best area), and I rarely have to wait ten minutes to get my bird photos confirmed. So maybe responsiveness is specific to the taxon as well.
1 Like
I wouldn’t say you have basic fungi, maybe there’s no such thing at all, it’s a hard group and often you can’t id anything from photos, or there’s one person who has to go through too many observations.
There’s no maybe, it is very specific to each taxon and each locality, trend is more observations of anything there’re in the area, less likely you’ll get id, less popular group is for general public, less experts there’re on website, that’s why birds (though they sit for long time in many tropical regions) will get ids almost instantly, especially in NA, but other groups won’t. I think you have pretty identifiable insects observed, I hope they will be ided through winter when all experts from northern hemisphere will finally get to iding things instead of travelling.
Also you refer to non-RG observations, not unidentified ones, of course they can be used, any observation matters.
4 Likes
It’s very taxon-specific.
And yes, birds do get identified faster. Other species, especially ones that are distinctive, visually appealing, or otherwise charismatic tend to get more attention. This happens not just on iNaturalist, but in the biological sciences in general:
- The twenty most charismatic species, PLOS One, 2018.
- Plant scientists’ research attention is skewed towards colourful, conspicuous and broadly distributed flowers, Nature Plants, 2021.
You can also see it in iNaturalist data from 2017: The Tres-Zeros Club: Meet the 500 species on iNat with at least 1,000 observations!. More bird species had at least 1000 identified observations than anything else, followed by plants, then insects. Given that there’s something around 50,000 vertebrate species (fish, mammals, birds, etc…) vs over 1 million insect species [source] and 370,000 flowering plant species, one starts to realize how people’s preferences skew things.
There’s a lengthy forum thread related to that: Biases in iNat data.
5 Likes
Interesting that the mallard apparently wasn’t in the top tier back then! Anyone know when and why it moved up so many places? Was there a concerted batch of duck curating?
Well, it was posted June 4, 2017, and by that time Mallard was in fact first: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?created_d2=2017-06-04&place_id=any&verifiable=any&view=species
It doesn’t correspon with mentioned 4,7 million observations, but going back in May still Mallard is the first https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?created_d2=2017-05-04&place_id=any&view=species
Here’s the first random date I chose where mallard is not the first, it’s a common easy species which is found everywhere and can be photographed with anything an ided.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?created_d2=2015-12-01&place_id=any&view=species
1 Like
Thanks, @murphyslab. I do get that. Trying hard to up my skills to help, but beyond the (agreed!) bias based on charisma, other species can be (it seems) impossible to ID from photos alone. Spiders apparently sometimes need the ventral side and genitalia dissections, fungi often need spore prints or at least cutting open or breaking off the stem, and so on. And resources are less plentiful. Almost all my unidentified photos are bugs or fungi. The exception are the Odonata. Those folks are on it! And of course, they are pretty darned charismatic. Thanks so much for your comment and for the paper links! I’m excited to read them.
2 Likes
Oops. Was a bit redundant as you did mention ease of id. And thanks for the thread link also!
1 Like
@fffffffff thanks so much for this confirmation and great discussion (and for the IDs!). I do love to learn, but I’m here for nature, so if they can be used down the line that’s all I need to keep me posting. And yes, I agree most fungi are tricky for a whole lot of reasons. Now having some ID regret. Well, we try to do better every day in every way.
Please understand that I’m basically here to help, and not criticize. So if the NRG observations are still useful, I’m not going to stress. I saw some stats on a page recently and calculated that it’s only about 11 percent of INat observers who ID at all. My goal is to up at least the number of observations that get IDd because I think that’s more fun for people, especially new naturalists, and I work hard to build a bigger and more engaged nature boat. For now I’ll do that by staring longer and harder at the blurry cellphone pics of birds. I do wish I could do better on the languishing plants, bugs, and fungi, but maybe that’s not meant to be. Would be super cool if we could have a thread on any fungi that are generally IDable by photo. May try to start something on Facebook on that topic…
2 Likes
That’s cool and I never felt you wanted to criticise! I think mushroom idea is a good one, you can start a topic in “general”, and I’m sure you’re capable of iding many other things other than blurry birds!
3 Likes
Just to reinforce, a rough ID is better than nothing! With moths at least, if they need dissection for a species ID, often a Complex is created. I don’t know about other taxa.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.