Can one see if participants are spending more time making identifications. Perhaps observations which were sitting on ‘needs identification’ for a long time are now being upgraded to Research Grade?
A lot of people are submitting observations from their homes and backyards. Are people data mining through old albums and submitting photos from back in the day? i.e. are we seeing more observations submitted not taken in the current year?
How could stats show how our iNat behaviour changing at the moment?
I just uploaded everything that’s on my hard drive from my pre-iNat days. Pity I don’t seem to have access to pre-2013 images, but I still expanded my dataset by A LOT!
Back in the predigital day, I took the painstaking trouble to write location and date on all the slides I took. My friends used to make fun of me for it. But now I have iNat records going back 36 years while they all have a bunch of pictures of animals from “somewhere in AZ sometime around 1993 or 4”.
(I have a few records my parents took of me in the 60s, fortunately prints back then had the date on the edge).
Personally. I am now spending half the day TRYING to provide identification for those photos not fully identified to species level in the insect family I concentrate on.
It is now part of my daily routine and helps enormously in coping with my isolation.