I stumbled into observations by students in northeast Iowa. Locations include La Claire, surrounding Scott County, and Scott Community College. (All the ones I’ve seen so far are from November, but there may be others in October.) Many, many of the observations include multiple photos showing multiple species. Can somebody contact the relevant teacher(s) and ask if they would require their students to split up these photos into multiple observations?
Not that we necessarily need them. Hundreds of photos of Solidago. Dozens of photos of the same three or four dead birds. And so forth. Frustrating.
By the way, those Moscow botany students are doing some ID’s, but species of the tallgrass prairie have limited distribution, so they’re limited in the help they can give.
Occasionally, when I come upon recent observations that look to be part of a class, I’ll make a comment to the effect of: “Hi! Welcome to iNaturalist! By the way, did your teacher mention that iNaturalist is primarily for wild organisms, not pets or garden plants? (Or mention that each species should be its own observation, or that the students really shouldn’t post photos of each other, etc.) If the teacher didn’t mention that, could you ask them to do so? Thanks!”
I don’t know if that works, but it makes me feel better.
Usually that would be a good idea. I’ll add it to my file of copy-and-paste responses! In this case, the kids were taken out to the site by bus. You can see it in some of the photos. The plants are nearly all wild things (plus a line of planted shrubs, but they may not understand that). So the problem (aside from massive repetition and sometimes odd identification) is the multiple-species-in-one-observation thing.