I’ve seen this several times recently: a crayfish specimen is observed a half dozen times at the same time and place. It’s clearly the same specimen, with many different people making an observation of it. This eats into identifier time. Should this type of group behavior be discouraged?
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My understanding is this is allowed (if not necessarily “encouraged”), as long as they’re each taking their own photo. Since they did all have an interaction with the organism, which is what inat is intended to document. As an IDer of course I also find it annoying sometimes, especially when each uploader somehow ends up picking a different species from the CV!
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Personally, I think these types of mass observations are great. If only everyone treated crayfish like celebrities!
As an IDer myself, I don’t think it adds too much to my work, as I can usually tell that a cluster of similar observations is the same specimen.
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They were there, they observed it, there is no problem.
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If it is a school group, then you can search that location and that date to find all their observations and go through them quickly. Who knows, it may encourage some to become more interested.
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There’s an observation field for that too. “same specimen, different observer”, I think, probably others that do the same job? I add it occasionally when people mention (or it’s blatantly obvious) that it’s the same as someone else’s.
Honestly been pretty handy - it made it very clear when I didn’t have as much information as I thought I did for identifying a plant (there was another leaf emerging behind the others that I couldn’t see in the observation I was initially looking at, which meant my initial thoughts were blatantly wrong… definitely learned the limits on what can be accurately identified to species there).
Possibly less useful for crayfish, but sounds cute indeed. Celebrity crayfish!
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Given one of the purposes of iNaturalist is to connect people to the natural world, many consider this a good thing to do. If it gets young people interested in nature and they hold onto this interest for life that is success.
It is even ok for one person to take a photo and several people in the same group post the same photo as their own observation, as long as every person also saw the same organism.
When using the same photo, just watch out for the licenses; in practice many people get this wrong. If just one person in the group uses “all rights reserved” someone will probably break the rules. If anyone uses any of the “attribution” licenses then everyone in the group needs to give credit to the others (and I’ve never seen anyone do this).
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If you are IDing for ‘seen here today’ then a batch is easy to click thru.
Except if they share the photo - wait - whose photo is it (did you see this yourself, or borrow your friend’s photo) ???
I see this quite often when school groups go walk-about. It is sometimes helpful to have multiple photos from different observations (some students are better photographers or have better cameras than others) to get a good ID. Quite often I will add a comment that connects the observations and add what characteristic helped with the ID. I have had teachers thank me for taking the time to help the students.
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Actually, I don’t think this is OK. We’re supposed to post our own photos, not someone else’s. However, with what’s obviously a school class I might let it slide.
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I don’t think this practice should be encouraged. I’ve seen the same photo posted 10 or 12 times, sometimes flipped this way or that. Teachers should instruct their students to each take their own photo. At least that way you get some different angles on the subject which increases the possibility of identifying it
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I wonder how difficult it would be to add a feature to combine multiple people’s observation of the same organism/allow someone to tag on an observation that they also saw it or otherwise link an observation to more than one person? It would probably be quite complicated to reconfigure the data structure if observations are currently structured as being under a user, but IMO from a user experience standpoint, it’s also the cleanest way to handle an organism being observed by multiple people in a group.
The point is to document what you see and hear. If I’m with a group, not all of my observations will necessarily be of the same species as others’ observations. Maybe I missed the bird that flew by. Maybe she missed the lizard that scuttled away. Or I missed a bunch because my phone died. No problem. We each submit what we saw/heard and recorded on our phone, camera, or audio device. Some observations may be the same, others may be different. I do not ask for photos/audio that others took because I don’t have it, because the point is to submit our own observations.
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Not all of my students can afford a cell phone. In these situations they work with a partner who has a phone and who is with them, to obtain a photo. Assignments are usually a single observation with an ethnobotanical explanation of a use of the plant mimicking an ethnobotanical herbarium sheet. I encourage them to use two different photos, but there are times when they overlook taking two unique photos.
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That makes sense. I didn’t consider that, and I should have.
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What is the problem with using other people’s photos if you were at the encounter with the organism and you have permission to use the photos? Is there actually a material issue with it or do you just not like it because it doesn’t fit your standards of what an observation should be?
I see a lot of comments lately about whether or not x or y observations “count” (as a separate question from whether they are useful data) and to be honest I don’t like it. I feel like the only person whose idea of whether it “counts” matters is the observer. We aren’t competing, I don’t see why it matters if we have the same standards for what “counts” as encountering an organism.
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If you personally saw it, and someone photographed the same exact organism at the same time you saw it and they gave you permission to use their photograph(you might consider putting who the original photographer is in the notes and that you were given permission) then there is no problem.
Other than the official guidelines, I hold an opinion that if this other person makes an observation on inat, you should not upload the same pictures. Except in cases where, for example, you took blurry pictures of a bird with your phone and your friend out with you had a telephoto lens, you can include their shot as the last picture for identifying purposes( I have seen many similar cases and think this is ok).
Otherwise it almost seems dishonest(opinion), and potentially causes problems with what could be considered a “duplicate” observation.
While yes the only person who has the final say in what “counts” as an observation is the observer, inat does have guidelines on observations, so while an observer might think it “counts” the observation may be marked as casual.
One issue is that even if you have permission to use the photos, they will nevertheless be credited to you and not the original photographer on iNat because the data infrastructure does not have a way to record image attribution to anyone other than the observer. I’ll note that from a legal standpoint, changing this would probably open up challenges related to how to determine whether permission was properly granted, so there may be a pragmatic component to the expectation that users should normally only upload their own images.
Another reason why it is better to post one’s own images if possible is because it reduces the likelihood of introducing errors in the data associated with the image. Depending on how the image is shared, it sometimes happens that the metadata associated with the image is not when it was originally taken, but when it was shared – since iNat uses the image metadata to assign a place and time to the observation, you then end up with incorrect data that the user may not be alert or savvy enough to correct.
Using someone else’s photos is also not ideal because it isn’t always clear whether the observer was in fact present and saw the organism themselves. If they were not, the observation represents secondhand information – this means that if there are things that seem odd (suspected wrong location etc.), the observer can not personally verify the correctness of the data.
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As long as you were there and saw the organism, you made an “observation”, so IMO whether someone else also made an observation is irrelevant to whether or not you made an observation. 50 observers and 1 organism = 50 observations, just as 50 organisms and 1 observer = 50 observations.
As for who actually took the photo being posted, I can see how in some situations that question may be more relevant than others. For example, my wife and I sometimes go on multi-week road trips and photograph thousands of organisms. We’re constantly handing off the camera between us, switching out lenses, grabbing each others’ phone to take pictures, etc. By the end of the trip, neither of us specifically remembers who was holding the camera for each individual photo in many cases. So did I take the photo, or did she? Who cares. We were both there looking at the organism, and which of us was holding the camera at that moment is such a minor part of the experience that we usually don’t even remember. We’ve certainly given each other permission to post each others’ photos. So while I can see the “who actually took the photo” question mattering in some cases, there are other situations where it’s not that important.
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