Recording presence of various things easily is what iNat does. Now if you mean meter by meter, every instance, that would get boring quickly, unless they are pretty. :) If it is on ongoing thing, the pretties would then have to be moving to be entertaining.
Recording absence by people that cannot necessarily identify the item correctly seems fraught with errors. I guess they could video an area and then various things could be searched for in the videos. From watching videos of things I learn from and/or enjoy, those get boring. You would have to pay people to watch videos of other peopleās walks. :)
I think you would need to pay people to have them scrutinize an area for specific things over an extended people. A group of people can enjoy each other and common interests while powering through a section of ground, but peoples interest would fade quickly.
Observer ability is one of the things we can (to a reasonable extent) account for with statistics, as no observer is ever perfect and imperfect detection is the norm with field data, even when using trained observers or experts.
As to presence/absence data not being feasible with community science, the success of eBird suggests otherwise. eBird is the single largest contributor to GBIF (which iNat contributes to). It has over 500 million records, and the majority of them are organized into complete checklists that yield presence/absence data.
No, eBird is recording presence/absence data when the complete checklist protocol is used, which most users do. Users report all species seen along with basic effort information.
There is no way to calculate true absences from presence-only data (there are some methods that calculate pseudo-absences, but they are for very specific applications).
Users report what was seen and heard, not what was unseen, unheard, or not there. They have no means of determining that. They record presence, not absence.
This is getting a off-topic, so Iāll stop replying to this forum topic but happy to discuss/explain further via PM if there is still some confusion.
eBird users do report what was undetected - the concept of their complete checklist protocol is that you report all detected individuals within the survey effort, therefore any species that you did not detect is not given an abundance and is therefore reported as undetected during that survey (the default value for all taxa is 0). This is identical to manually entering a ā0ā for every possible species that wasnāt detected, which would be an unnecessary waste of time when dealing with a large # of potential taxa.
You can bypass the presence/absence protocol in eBird by selecting the incomplete checklist option. In that case the survey is treated as presence only. But that option is used far less than the complete checklist protocol.
Thatās just how ecological inventory works. Thereās no way to absolutely prove absence. The ebird data is as best as one can reasonably get to absence data.
Even focused surveys for a specific organism, like going to look for a rare plant, canāt really infer absense. Itās instead noticed as āfailed to findā and not truly considered absence unless no one can find it for decades.