Maybe User Population Too US Based?

[sedgequeen]

Although I’m located in Oregon, U.S.A., I like to identify plants (and birds and large mammals – some of us do cross taxonomic boundaries) throughout the world, though I’m best at North America and sort of OK for Europe, worse elsewhere. I tend to avoid IDing for Turkiye. Why? First, the west part of the country is part of the Mediterranean area where habitats are chopped up, leading to much local variation and lots of taxa, many of which I don’t know about. Multiple Daucus species, even. Second, botanists have active in this area for about three centuries and have split many taxa in ways I don’t understand and in some cases find it hard to care about. Third, the east part is in an area of complicated terrane and much species diversity, some of it undescribed or poorly known (at least for the fine-leaved fescues I worked on). In other words, naming organisms can be really hard in Turkiye. I’d like to help, but my ignorance is great.

I recommend recruiting iNaturalist participants all you can. Suggestions include giving presentations, setting up City Nature Challenges or other bioblitzes, partnering with any sort of nature-centered club, talking to academics (bringing in specific questions – can you help me ID this observation?), encouraging teachers to use iNaturalist for class assignments. Of course all these suggestions involve actually talking to people, so I wouldn’t like to do any of them, myself. Sigh. But it is possible to grow your own users and experts. (I was talking today to a botanist in my area who works on liverworts and hornworts – primitive plants – and says she and the two other local people who work on them ID each other’s observations because who else can/will?)

Plus, of course, keep asking for help here. Limiting the area as @dgwdoesthings suggests can really help.

[wildlandblogger]

One additional issue I know about botany in Turkiye is that it is VERY diverse with lots of small-ranged endemics.

[KelianG]

There’s several issue IDing plants in Turkey that can explain :

1. Endemism : Turkey is wordlwide hotspot speciation. Take Campanula genus : 140 taxa 52% endemic ; Hypercium : 100 taxa 40% endemism. And so on. This is extremely hard for an outsider to work on ID in this country.
2. Lack of online flora references. When i tried (for Hypericum) i could’t find any online ressource of Turkey flora (recent atlas or illustrated keys) that could help ID.
3. Turkey is not include in Europe perimeter - in Inat. So identifiers (mostly “European” - outside US) have to search specificaly for Turkey, Western paleartic, Asia..

[petezani]

I ID across the New World just because of my background and interests. However, what I have noticed is that there are two tendencies in identifiers…1.they tend to be taxon specific identifying in their corner of taxonomic interest with more or less specificity depending on their training, and 2.they tend to be geographically specific identifying in their country or region depending on their geographic preferences. When I ID in South America there are a subset of identifiers I run into again and agin that are completely different than the subset that identify in Central America and different again from those in North America. This is not universal and there are those that I see in several places, but those tend to be people with experience in both places (say, a researcher who lives in Arizona but has done work in Costa Rica).

To me this suggests that the large number of identifiers in the U.S. is due to the large number of people with disposable time and money as well as educational background to have the luxury of being able to identify. So to solve the problem one would need an educational infrastructure that teaches taxonomy-specific courses as well as a population with the luxury of time and/or money not to mention the environmental awareness to understand the benefits of identifying (let alone observing). In other words, it all starts locally. Those from outside an underserved region no doubt can help by pitching in where they can and this is one reason I like identifying across the range of South America as there are many underserved pockets of diversity out there. Doing this provides positive feedback to the observers who may get the added feeling of being seen and understanding the value of their contributions, which can lead to them becoming local identifiers. It seems to confirm in people that contributing their observations is worthwhile and leads to more of that thing, which of course doesn’t solve the problem and may in fact create more of the imbalance between observations and identifications, but in my opinion that is never a bad thing. ‘Build it and they will come’ as the saying goes. So, the long-term solution is build it locally, but keep in mind there are few shortcuts to doing so, the City Nature Challenge being one notable exception.

[jakedalzell]

In Britain and Ireland most expert records use other platforms like iRecord (governmental) or the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s database. iNaturalist is often disregarded because the IDers are not vetted. Amongst people under say 35 iNat is increasingly popular because it is much easier to use and more interactive than these other platforms. BSBI Experts (such as vice-county recorders) are increasingly IDing on iNat and it is increasingly integrated into recording, with the research grade data now flowing into the other databases I mentioned. The way people’s fear was alleviated is that research grade observations flowing into iRecord/BSBI databases are not assumed to be correct and still have to be verified by that database’s experts, the same as an observation submitted directly would be.

[greek_cicada_project]

I can totally understand this kind of frustration.
Most of the times, the best we can do is genus level.

As already mentioned above, there are some reasons why we cannot ID any further.

1. There is no (online) comprehensive flora checklist for Turkey. A lot of the literature is inaccessible/not available online or the species descriptions are in different languages which can get quite tricky and exhausting to go through.
2. Keys to the species do not exist in most of the cases, we have to compare pictures or herbarium records and find out the differences ourselves. If the pictures are even available.
   Sometimes the pictures from inofficial flora websites do not show the correct species.
3. As already mentioned - high endemism. Especially in SW Anatolia there might be different species on each mountain/mountain range.
   But also in Central Turkey (East) Mediterranean, Pontian, Irano-Turanian and Central European plants meet. So the knowledge of species chorology is important. There might be still new undescribed species.
4. There are indeed not many experts on the Turkish flora on iNat. This does not make iNat too US based but I’d rather think the other way around, why are there so few plant enthusiasts/botanists from Turkey on iNat?
   In Greece for example - my area of expertise - there are some really good experts which focus on certain islands like Crete or Rhodos, but in the mainland and mountains of continental Greece our knowledge of plants could be better. I have to admit that the mountainous regions of Greece are insufficiently researched. Very few keys exist (there’s one book with many species but inaccessible online) and I mostly tend to ID at genus level. There are also not many herbarium records with pictures. Compared to that, the island of Crete is very well researched, because it is first of all an island and secondly many botanists explored this island. Turkey is - as mentioned in 3. - a big landmass with an interesting geology and biogeography. So much more complex. Which is great but also much more difficult to deal with.
5. Certain iNat pictures do not allow any further identification. Some genera have incredibly similar flowers (e.g. Ornithogalum) and need closer/more precise pictures of the leaves, fruit, sometimes even the bulbs.

The Aegean plants are better researched and systematically catalogued, since they have been thoroughly researched by European botanists & collectors (Heldreich, Orphanides, Grisebach, d’Urville, Rechinger, Strid et al.), and since the East Aegean Islands share an almost identical flora with the Turkish Aegean coast we can use the Vascular Plants of Greece Cheklist portal. There might be still some species which occur on Turkish mainland and not on the East Aegean Islands though. But most of the plants are present on both sides.

I hope this helps a bit understanding the whole situation.
I can’t promise I’ll know every species but I’ll try to go through your Aegean plant observations (at least at genus level) ;)

[sedgequeen]

@salix-babylonica – All the things written here could discourage a person thinking about using iNaturalist for Turkiye. Actually, it points out how important any observations from the country can be. So much diversity! So little known! Even if observations don’t get ID’d for years, they’re important data points. More important than most of those I enjoy posting here in western Oregon, to tell the truth.

[surfnsarah22]

I just ran into this issue while visiting Nepal :(

[petezani]

Identifications can be made independent of time meaning at any time in the future. However, observations can only be made in a particular time and place and hence are snapshots of the diversity of that time and place, which can never be recovered as time moves forward.

[salix-babylonica]

I would like to thank you for every comment and especially for the long explanation.
Thanks to you, I see that I have explained exactly what I wanted to say.
This problem is not only about Turkiye. Anyone who makes observations in different geographies will notice it. When I uploaded an observation in Türkiye, it was not id’ed for years, while when I uploaded an observation in Brussels, it was id’ed within seconds.

Of course, there are also reasons for this indifference, such as the language barrier etc. I think that more advertising and cooperation activities are needed in non-Western countries. There are millions of academic students.

Several big universities and private colleges in Türkiye actively use this site. For example, in Ankara, students from METU and Hacettepe, which are some of the most prestigious universities in the country, are quite active. However, these are the people who discovered iNaturalist with their own personal efforts, just like me.

Therefore, my solution suggestions are as follows;

1- For example, iNaturalist stuff can send e-mails to a few of the biggest universities in non-Western countries, briefly explaining the site. It is free and easy. They can invite students to projects. Etc.

2- Maybe some cooperation be suggested to local academics?

3- Automatic translations can be an option when a comment is written in English (or another language) to overcome the language barrier.

4- Maybe ads can be placed on social media, sites like Instagram, to spread among young people?

I see, iNat already popular in most Western countries. But for the others a little push is seems to be necessary :)

Thank you very much again :)

[quillipede]

I do think iNaturalist and the community it enables both suffer from a lack of visibility in the non-anglophone world. I say that deliberately - I don’t think the issue is mainly national in nature, I think the issue is primarily a linguistic one. Areas dominated by native/monolingual English speakers are much more represented than other linguistic geographies.

Canada is a good case study for this. Our second largest province is the mostly French-speaking Québec, which has often been noted to be sorely underrepresented on iNaturalist in terms of participation per population size. To compare:

• Québec (francophone) has 1.6 million obs and 9.1 million people (~17k per 100,000)
• New Brunswick (bilingual) has 470,000 obs and 860,000 people (~55k per 100,000)
• British Columbia (anglophone) has 4.7 million obs and 5.7 million people (~82k per 100,000)
• Alberta (anglophone) has 1 million obs and 4.9 million people (~21k per 100,000)
• Ontario (anglophone) has 7.1 million obs and 16 million people (~44k per 100,000)

So, language seems to be a huge barrier. I think a concerted and deliberate effort to promote iNaturalist in other languages would be very helpful here.

[jasonhernandez74]

@dgwdoesthings

Yes but prolific identifiers, at specially at a species level usually restrict themselves to one iconic taxa unless they are identifying unkowns.

Usually perhaps, but not necessarily. Those with broad enough interests to be able to do several iconic taxa to species level are very valuable.

@dgwdoesthings

I don’t know any animalia identifiers who do both birds and fish or any other crossing

Depending on the part of the world, I might be doing birds, butterflies, or flowering plants.

@petezani

they tend to be geographically specific identifying in their country or region depending on their geographic preferences.

It’s a rare part of the world where I am of no use at all, although some can be pretty close.

I know that we have largely been talking about species-level identification, but it bears saying again: Charadriidae look like Charadriidae everywhere in the world, and the same can be said of many other family-level taxa. So just because you might not know the species in a geographic region, doesn’t mean you can’t help with more than just unknowns there.

[arnim]

A corollary to this is that I’m (unwittingly/unwillingly) leading observer of a whole host of weed species, for which my local NZ-based identifiers are also the leading identifiers for these species. A number of these species we have more of here than in their land of origin.

[salix-babylonica]

A little addition to this,
This imbalance also cause a lot of distrubution abnormalities on the map.
For example, there are more than 500 bird species in Turkiye, but it reflected iNat 10% lower.
For this cause, most organisms show very dense population in the western countries, but the other world is under a mist.
If anyone writes an article using that info, it will be surely misleading.

[lynkos]

@dgwdoesthings

iNat was started in the US and is one of the reasons why a significant portion of the user base is from there. So there will be an inherent bias towards the majority of observations, though as time goes on this seems to be improving.

When I first came across iNaturalist quite a few decades ago, the US bias (perfectly natural at the time, nothing negative implied) was pretty accentuated, to the point where I (wrongly) decided that it wasn’t worth participating with my Italian-based observations. When I came across it again many years later, I found the geographic distribution of both observers and IDers to be much more widely distributed, at least as far as the European continent was concerned. It’s a ripple effect that expands slowly, yes, but (fingers crossed) steadily, with the active help of all of us, observers and IDers alike.
For me, the turning point came when I realised that iNaturalist was not all about “having”… in other words, useful just to get an ID on a particular organism (not encouraging in a zone with scarce geographic coverage) but also, even above all, about “giving” and that I could make an active and positive contribution to helping expand the area covered just by posting observations and, as far as my knowledge permits, making IDs in that particular geographic area.
Then on the other side, there is the matter of active publicity, fundamental of course, but an uphill struggle when most new observers join to get an ID and the knowledge base is just not there to give them the necessary encouragement. A step at a time .

[parkie818]

Hi @salix-babylonica
There is a very large international iNaturalist network. This is its strength as it allows taxa experts in one country to assist another. Particularly important with invasive species, and sharing of biodiversity data, via the GBIF. iNaturalist is very popular in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Other parts of Europe, South America, South Africa and parts of Asia. See this link: https://www.inaturalist.org/sites/network

[parkie818]

Hi @salix-babylonica
Also see here part of the international iNaturalist network: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2024-umbrella

[spiphany]

@salix-babylonica

This imbalance also cause a lot of distrubution abnormalities on the map.
For example, there are more than 500 bird species in Turkiye, but it reflected iNat 10% lower.
For this cause, most organisms show very dense population in the western countries, but the other world is under a mist.
If anyone writes an article using that info, it will be surely misleading.

Anyone using iNat for research needs to be aware that the density of iNat records do not represent abundance or absolute species richness, but rather the presence of iNat users. This, in turn, correlates with things like demographics (socioeconomic position, access to green spaces, amount of leisure time, internet availability and expense, etc.).

I think there are probably some additional factors that affect whether iNat is widely used by the people in a particular region. An important one is attitudes about citizen science in general, both on the part of scientists and governments and the people themselves. E.g.:

• scientists may have the view that laypeople cannot make real contributions to science, or they may be skeptical about the quality of the data on a website where records can be verified by anyone regardless of their expertise

• governments may not have an interest in encouraging people to collect data (whether because they are concerned that this data might reveal things that they would prefer remain hidden, or simply because they do not have the funding/infrastructure to do anything with that data)

• laypeople may not see photographing organisms as a meaningful way of engaging with nature (note that this is not the same thing as not taking an interest in nature or not caring about the environment, biodiversity, etc. – there are other cultural ways of relating to nature that are not centered around collecting and cataloguing it)

[fuligogirl]

Interesting – this is true globally, but in New Zealand (where I’m from), we have more plant observations (1.36 million) than animal observations (1.19 million), and 12,000 animal identifiers (0.01 identifiers per observation) compared to only 7200 plant identifiers (0.005 identifiers per observation)

[vbjanos]

iNaturalist is a second tier engagement platform as it mostly attracts people who already have a nature related interest. Ads on generic social media might just miss the target audience,

You are lucky to have great birding spots and they are well known all around the world from documentaries. If you can spare a couple of photos of iconic (but not rare) plants, you could contact whoever produces the pamphlets for local and international tourists to include those.
A sign at a reserve entry with a link to iNat is the most effective though.