As useful as iNaturalist can be, we need to be aware of its inherent bias, namely, the data is skewed toward easily accessible places. Today I was curious about Marajó Island – the big island at the mouth of the Amazon. Well, there is no such place in the iNat list of places, but that’s okay – I cou…

Observing is not that problematical if it’s not thousands of people at one spot, I believe it’s better to document what is there than lose it and ask yourself what was there before as it happens worldwide.

There’s a lot of papers describing this phenomenon in other types of biodiversity data: https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.12624 The large volume of plant records in global DAI (119 million; Fig. S1a) may misguide perceptions of the actual available information on plant occurrences. Our basic validatio…

На мой взгляд иНат показывает не реальное распространение видов, а наиболее наблюдаемые виды. То есть он показывает с какими видами и где чаще всего контактирует человек.

You can adjust for it, as this classic paper illustrates. Although methods may have advanced since 1996, the observation bias for this species is still extreme. Clearly, more iNaturalist observers are needed by whiskey distilleries. McNoleg, O., 1996. The integration of GIS, remote sensing, expert …

I have a topic about the problem in the other direction: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/abnormality-bias/10626 People also are biased in the other direction, because when people go to a novel location, they are more likely to want to capture everything that they see, because it is a rarity to the…

For the Southern Bioblitz Cape Town was asked to target our nature reserves. But even aiming at that request Wolfgat Reserve is still zero obs, for the second time (not safe, not many iNatters nearby …) https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2020-cape-town/journal/41620-monda…

It’s interesting to know what species people notice and pay attention to. One could argue that’s useful information as well.

Good point. Very small life forms will be ignored by people who don’t have specialised equipment to photograph them. I guess that there are also very few observations of skittish critters by those who only use their phones as their wide angle lenses mean you would have to get closer than the critter…

I would like to better understand the automated cleaning section of that article that talks about flagging “coordinates in the sea for terrestrial taxa” as errors. It’s simply not always the case, as demonstrated in this observation: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/33219090

Agreed. Personal experience has also revealed that specialized equipment can also limit what is recorded. Because I was interested in making observations of pollinators this summer, I had my macro lens on my camera. Even if I had my telephoto lens with me, it was extra effort to change lenses and I …

Not an unbiased dataset

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Biases in iNat data General	88	8456	July 15, 2021
Improving Data Quality General	33	1434	June 13, 2022
Abnormality bias General	21	3520	April 19, 2020
Mapping distributions of iNatters via common species General	26	1851	April 29, 2024
Strengths and Weaknesses of iNaturalist Data General	57	10400	December 23, 2020

Not an unbiased dataset

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