The South African Animal Demographic Unit held distributional data for a wide range of animal species that could be downloaded for a specific geographic area, i.e. quarter degree grid. The ADU website was discontinued recently and there was a message that the existing database will be migrated to iNaturalist. Does anyone know whether this has been done, or when?
Will appreciate feedback
RR
Ask @tonyrebelo ?
I’m not familiar with this database in particular, but just straight up distributional data isn’t a good fit for iNaturalist. It also seems like a wholesale import of data like this wouldn’t meet iNat’s guidelines for using the platform - staff have noted that iNat shouldn’t serve as a repository for institutional data and that observations should be for an individual observers interactions with nature. Just making the dataset available on GBIF or via some other data portal sounds like a better option.
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iNat did help migrate user data and observations from iSpotNature for southern Africa to iNaturalist quite a few years ago, that was a one-time thing. I’ve never hard of ADU data in regard to iNat, and I agree with @cthawley that it doesn’t sound like the right fit for iNat.
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The ADU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Demography_Unit) Citizen Science recording programmes have been in trouble for some time. Basically the ADU was based at University of Cape Town, and the contractual agreements were binding to this. In its heyday (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374509961_The_Virtual_Museum_an_African_biodiversity_database_holding_more_than_two_million_records) it collected data under different projects: e.g.ReptileMAP, LepiMAP, OdonataMAP, PHOWN (photos of weaver nests), MammalMAP, FrogMAP, TreeMAP, BirdPix, EchinoMAP, BOP (birds with odd plumages), ScorpionMAP, LacewingMAP, MushroomMAP, OrchidMAP, DungbeetleMAP, FishMAP) When Les Underhill left UCT he started a new company. https://thebdi.org/ but the various “MAP” projects had to stay behind, and were adopted by the Percy FitzPatric Institute of African Ornithology as a wind down to being archived in the UCT libraries.
SANBI offered to repeat the iSpot migration process for the ADU VMs, and advertized the option. However, there was strong opposition from many contributors, many of whom where ignorant of and refused to believe the financial situation and imminent closure. Some 73 observers with 48,745 observations did opt to migrate (and signed an agreement to that effect), but given the strong resistance SANBI withdrew the option. Several users migrated on their own, or extracted their own data and used a package developed by @alexanderr to migrate to iNaturalist. Part of the resistance was based on emotional and national arguments (keep our data in South Africa), but two strong reasons were:
- iNaturalist used CS to make IDs, but all IDs on the VMs were exclusively done by experts. Apparently the lack of quality control of identifications is a negative point against iNaturalist
- The VMs included museum and private collections data records. These cannot be accommodated by iNaturalist as the data belong to the museums and private individuals (and unfortunately the data agreements were between users and the ADU-UCT and not transferable to third parties - and not even to SANBI who bankrolled the digitization and georeferencing of these data). Especially LepiMap has spent considerable costs and time curating these data, and the LepSoc did not want to lose this resource.
So there the matter rested. The curator of the VMs retired. And the data were archived by UCT libraries. And the contributors were left in the lurch.
Because the ADU VM contractual agreements did not include transfer of the data, this is not an option. And any transfer of data without the users specific consent will be illegal.
Transfer of the data and images is trivial, A bit more difficult is transferring the existing identifications, but many of the ADU VM experts are already using iNaturalist, so most identification can migrate (from iSpot identifications by identifiers not on iNaturalist were designated to commentary).
I am aware of, but have not seen the message.
This is the latest I am aware of (thanks to @robert_taylor)
from Robert Taylor:
…
Just in case you have other people asking you - Michael Brooks (michael.brooks@uct.ac.za) from the fiztitute has been very helpful in assisting people who would want to move their data from VMUS to iNat. They will just have to provide him with their ADU number (which is easy to look up) and he will send all the metadata including coordinates as a spreadsheet and all the photographs in a zip file.
So it looks like if you are interested, please contact Michael, and he will send your data and pictures.
Ask Alex for his migration package, and you can easily transfer your data.
- But I dont know how this caters for identifications and the experts comments on the observations: I suspect that those will be lost.
- And it has to be done on an individual basis - you cannot transfer anyone else’s data.
If you do migrate your data, please include a field with the original ADU VM Numbers for cross-referencing. (like such LepiMapNo=43545)
Examples include: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?verifiable=any&field:LepiMapNo=
[for the migration programme the field number is 12979 for LepiMap - details: https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/12979
Each VM will have its own field number. ]
I hope that this helps.
Good luck with migrating your data.
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The contractual agreement precludes transferring the observations to third parties. The dataset was available on GBIF, but as the data are now archived, that right falls away - GBIF can use the ADU VM data so long as the VMs exist.
cthawley Should you not have done a little homework before commenting? The ADU VMs are an almost identical model to iNaturalist, albeit a very simple model. Transfer of data are trivial, provided that Users join iNaturalist and agree to the transfer. But with all ADU VM staff retired, this now has to be done by the users, as outlined above.
Thanks for the response @tonyrebelo. I really hope that there will be a resolution to the problem very soon as the use of that data for EIA purposes is invaluable.
Kind regards
Riaan Robbeson
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