I do like that system. You can outvote experts, but they are still more likely to be correct. I think the iNat one is more fun though (but not more likely to be accurate). By changing the assigned reputations you can get the relative weighting between expert and non-expert opinion that you want. But then it would go back to where this is like sending specimens to museum curators for review, instead of as one person said, being a field notebook for casual users - which they claimed was the aim of iNat. That would exacerbate the lack of identifiers problem, whenever people can’t do much to their own observations to advance it to the highest grade… the majority of users is then limited by the minority amount of identifiers.
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I think many people are encouraged to upload their pics here.
But they are not really encouraged to identify them. On the contrary, there is this constant warning of being careful with IDs so we do not have too many bad identifications. And I think this is a great thing for the finetuning (~ family to species ID). But it is not so good for the coarse pre-IDs (phylum would suffice!), since IDers for molluscs regularly search for “molluscs” and not for “unknown”.
I personally think that nowadays for every upload you should at least have to give a coarse ID. Literally every person on this planet knows a “plant” or a “bird” or a “fish”, so … is it just an act of laziness to leave it at “unknown”? Or are they too intimidated, too scared to make mistakes? But if a newbie mixes up crabs with spiders … no big deal, because the spider pro will find a crab in his search results and respond accordingly. He will not find it at all when the obs is set to “unknown”.
I guess that in the initial days of iNat there was a strong notion of getting people to just upload. But nowadays, in this size, with that many unknown obs, the focus should be shifting towards getting people to identify. Perhaps if giving a coarse ID in laymans words (“fish”) became mandatory for uploading, some uploaders might start thinking about identifying at all instead of being afraid to do something “wrong”.
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Sounds very good to me. Would resolve some issues on iNat. (Like 30 pupils of a schoolclass downvoting three experts on school project identifications out of solidarity with their classmate, to give an obvious example.)
Minor detail (already off topic?) … I do not like giving professional experts this kind of extra credit in advance (reputation=1000). In many cases it is more likely that an experienced naturalist knows more about the taxa in his area than the professional from another continent. Btw I have been correcting IDs of pros ever since my very first classes at university (and I didn’t stop to do so on iNat). Being a good professor or a great curator doesn’t automatically make you a reliable identifier. Occasionally pros tend to be rather sloppy when it comes to students or laymans IDs (simply because they are wrapped up in their own projects and usually have little time for anything else).
But in general I like this system of iSpot very much. I’d love to see those ideas applied to iNaturalist.
I think that a lot of the “needs ID” observations do not really need ID (at least for e.g. many insects). I would be quite happy if iNat de-emphasized species-level IDs as the universal goal for every single observation by changing the tags to something else, for example four kinds of tags with the meaning:
- needs community ID
- has community ID
- has community species ID
- is Research Grade
The reason is that treating anything without species-level ID as “needing ID” and labeling it with a big “needs ID” tag encourages people to assign species-level IDs more than they should.
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Why not just pick one identifiable species at that point? Clearly the observer doesn’t care so just choose for them so that the observation isn’t in limbo forever. I do this all the time tbh.
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This week my ID pages (filtered to Southern California) are full of former unknowns all identified by people whose profiles say they are at Moscow State University. How interesting! I wonder if a professor put them up to it.
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Yes, there’s a course in MSU for non-biology students, they have lectures uploaded on YouTube, but in Russian of course, their last homework (after they learned through fall how to use website and uploaded own observations) is to make some ids from US (as I understood) uknowns, but only correct ids will be counted (for automat. course completion they need to make 1k ids, so some are working hard on that).
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Interesting. Do you have any idea why they’ve been asked to ID US observations?
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Probably because of their numbers and new fauna/flora, so they learn groups and not just local species.
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Wow! They seem to be doing a good job. I’ve seen a couple of very common errors, such as believing kelp to be a plant or overlooking the camouflaged insect the observer was actually photographing, but that’s no worse than I or anyone else have done.
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Thank you - I also came across an ID from MSU. Will expect to see more in that case.
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Also you can comment with the link to the how to get identifications for your observations tutorial here in the forum.
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Me too! Since I was unfamiliar with most of the species I returned the favor by giving the student from Moscow some annotations and putting some of his observations in projects where they might more likely get seen and IDed by others.
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Every comment thread on dandelion-like flowers:
Would-be identifier: “Did you get a side shot of the flower?”
Original observer: “Sorry, no.”
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I agree with @ocean_beach_goth. I always try to identify at least as many observations as I submit, but mostly focus on welcoming new people in my state and identifying unknowns as plants, insects, or other top-level categories out of fear of not knowing all the possible local species. I’m an experienced gardener and have taken a class on nomenclature. If I knew what resources I could use to usefully identify native wildflowers and trees in my state, I’d spend a few hours a week doing this.
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Like you I want to learn plants native to my region. I see from your profile that your state is North Carolina. Mine is South Carolina. You might find this project a good starting point since the Carolinas have some plants in common. https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/south-carolina-native-plants
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Took a long time, but I got through all the San Francisco Bay Area Asteraceae. Moved on to the Puget Sound Country Asteraceae. I am developing a hypothesis that every region has that one non-daisy that people think is a daisy. So many California Buttercup identified as “Asteraceae.” That taxon does not occur in the Puget Sound Country, so what do I see there? Common St. John’s-Wort identified as “Asteraceae.”
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People put too much trust in the apps. Computer vision works well for certain organisms, but not well enough for others (like plants).
The pile will only get bigger and bigger. And besides that; there is also the not so small matter of the many hundreds of thousands of research grade obs with the wrong ID.
The pile does indeed get bigger and bigger. I was discouraged by that for a while, but I’ve tried to reframe my thoughts to realize that the more people use iNat and the more observations that are made are indications that this platform is a success. A runaway success, in my judgment. The more people use iNat, the larger those piles are going to grow.
If we want people to understand and appreciate the biological complexity on earth, iNat is a great tool towards that goal. Those of us who make identifications are providing positive feedback, not only to the biologists and naturalists who already know what they looking at, but also to people who are just starting to learn about the natural world. Hell, it’s only through iNat that I’ve learned - in the past month or so! - that Slime Molds are not Fungi. And I was a professional biologist before I retired.
Being overwhelmed and discouraged at the never-ending pile of Needs ID observations is completely reasonable. But are we accomplishing a goal that’s larger than just completing the task of “finishing” the identifications? I think we are.
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The more data we have, the more data in need of ID we will have and the more data quality issues we will have. When i started using iNat in 2011 i would literally review every plant observation that anyone added. Which was barely any. It was awesome being on the top of the leaderboards but kind of an echo chamber. This is better/ The data is never going to be perfect, by any means, and will always require significant review if you’re using it in a scientific publication. Remember this is a group field notebook, not a heavily curated herbarium. And even still, heavily curated herbariums have plenty of errors too and often IDs aren’t ever verified by multiple people at all.
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