Hi, guys! I’m new here on the forum, but I’ve been using iNat since 2020 and got way more involved only this year. There’s something that’s been upsetting me regarding some observations, especially those made at universities, so I’d like to hear from you and understand if it’s a real problem, if there’s something that curators can do, or if it’s just me being a nitpicky.
I noticed that some observations are of animals and plants from scientific collections, and I can tell this because they have tags, serial numbers, and a color that only preserved specimens have, and also all the other clues on the photos, such as lab materials. Is it ok for iNat to permit those observations? I mean, they belong to public collections, and by public I mean that the information about them can be found on official websites, like speciesLink, Flora e Funga do Brasil, and WoRMS. But since they belong to an institution, which is responsible for their property, and the curators of these institutions probably don’t even know of these observations here, I wonder if it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t seem to be aligned with the main goals of iNat, such as connect people with nature and stimulate citizen science.
Anyway, a question that’s been on my mind lately. Also, sorry for my english!
I don’t think you’re being nitpicky. I do think there’s a legitimate distinction between an observation of a living organism and a photograph of a preserved specimen.
That said, I don’t think specimens from universities or museums are automatically inappropriate for iNat. A preserved specimen can still contain useful information, especially if it has a collection locality, date, or other valuable metadata.
The important thing is transparency. It should be clearly stated that the organism is a preserved specimen, rather than letting people assume it was observed in the field. I also wouldn’t assume that curators are unaware of the uploads or that sharing them is unauthorized.
So I’d see this more as an issue of proper labeling and context than something that should automatically be prohibited.
The answer here really depends on whether the observer (on iNat) actually collected the museum specimen or not. If the iNat user collected the specimen themselves and uploads it to iNat with the date/time/location of collection, there is no problem.
If the observer didn’t collect the specimen themselves (i.e., they just saw it in a museum), they could upload it as a “captive” observation (since the organism is in the museum because humans intended it to be, not because the organism wanted to be) with the date/time/location that they saw (i.e., when they went to the museum). This isn’t encouraged, but a few observations here and there aren’t a big deal.
Users shouldn’t add observations of museum specimens at the date/time/location of the original capture, even if they know it correctly like from a tag, if they weren’t there at the time of capture. iNat is about one’s own experiences with nature, not uploading someone else’s.
Additionally, staff have noted that iNat shouldn’t be used as an alternative pathway to get collection data online/accessible. There are other routes much better suited to this. So collections definitely shouldn’t be bulk added to iNat (except in cases, as above, where the uploader collected the specimen themselves, in which case it’s ok if they want to do that - it’s their experience).
There are a fair amount of existing threads that discuss similar situations that you could check out:
As I understand it, you’re objecting on the grounds that the people and organizations who own the collections might not want those observations to be made, right?
The purpose of museum collections is to document the organisms in question for science, and sometimes to show them to people for educational and entertainment purposes. Given that, I don’t think museum curators are likely to be upset by someone sharing photos of things from that collection. Especially given that the observations are by necessity either of something that’s available for public viewing (i.e. something that’s meant for everyone to look at and potentially take photos of), or made by someone who works at the museum and deals with that collection.
And there is, I’d argue, a connection to nature to be had from looking at preserved specimens. It’s not quite the usual sort of connection, but it’s a good way to learn about details of an organism that we can’t reasonably (or can’t ethically) see on a live one.
(By the way, your English is fine! And you wouldn’t need to apologize even if it wasn’t.)
Oh, I don’t have a problem with the argument that they shouldn’t post photos of museum specimens that they didn’t personally collect. I’m all in favour of that.
The issue is that it’s very difficult to tell anyone on iNat that they can’t or shouldn’t do something. People will occasionally post photos of specimens. If you ask “did you personally collect that”, they often don’t answer.
I would rather they post them with the date/location of original capture than with the date/location they photographed them. I can present a reasoned argument for why that’s what they should do. If they use the date/location of photographic capture, that creates a bogus observation. I guess it doesn’t matter if the observation is somehow made casual, but I think that’s going to be a hard sell for the observer.
My understanding, based on what admin has said previously (see above), and general practice is that some small scale uploading of museum specimens is allowed(/tolerated) and adds value (e.g., rarely seen but common species, new to iNaturalist, new for region, etc.). However, it should never be done on a personal account if you were not the collector or present. There are a few accounts run by individuals uploading small numbers of museum specimens that disclose they are not a personal account. And again, not for bulk upload. I think the critical thing in regards to iNaturalist is that the date and location of the observation is accurate to the collection date, otherwise the whole observation is valueless.
Also, regarding institutions ownership/curators being unaware of observations. I am a grad student at a natural history museum and have worked in multiple institutions for the last ~7 years. While specimens “belong” to individual institutions, the general consensus you will feel being in one is that the specimens belong to science (i.e, not “property” per se). They are frequently loaned out for research (the entire specimen, portions of the specimen, tissue samples, etc.) or even permanently sent to another institution occasionally. Digitization something every single institution (with the resources) is working towards. I would be surprised if any curator would be against the occasional upload of a specimen to iNaturalist. Also, collections are not generally open to the public. There is almost no situation I can imagine where a curator would not be aware that someone was digitizing a record. Perhaps they may be unaware of it getting uploaded to iNaturalist (unlikely), but again, only someone trusted, with access to a collection and equipment for digitization could do that.
The problem with posting photos of museum specimens is mainly if the iNat observer did not collect/observe the specimen when and where it was originally encountered in the wild. It’s not their observation. I would never make an observation of a museum specimen that I did not collect/observe in the wild, and I don’t post iNat records of specimens I did collect and preserve in the past. That’s because those museum specimen records are already in GBIF and other databases and adding an iNat record for the same thing is redundant.
However, in regards to the last point, I could see someone posting an iNat record of a specimen that they collected and did put in a museum if they felt it important to document in photos the coloration or other features that are lost in preservation. They should add a note that the iNat record is also a specimen in the museum where it was deposited (with a catalog number) to avoid confusion.
Ah, I hadn’t seen that comment. I disagree. Date is such a critical component of an observation. Even if iNaturalist is for a user’s interaction with nature, if I were uploading a specimen observation, I would use the date of collection rather than submitting summer flower in December (as a hypothetical). It is far worse to upload bad data IMO. That is presumably part of the reason folks who do choose to upload small quantities of museum specimens create a new account, rather than a personal account, to do so.
It’s ok for a personal interaction to be in a museum as long as the observation is accurately assessed in the DQA. Captive/cultivated observations aren’t “valueless.” If it’s important to get a photo onto iNat, etc. (which may be valuable), this is a way to do it.
In regards to
I know that staff have asked some users doing this to stop and in at least one case, I think an account like this has had content deleted (though I don’t know whether by the user or staff).
Interesting question. Even if it’s not the platform’s primary purpose, I think there are legitimate reasons for people to post photos of specimens. Digitization is definitely an endgoal of nearly all collection curators I’ve met, but we’re far from there yet. Many well-funded collections are advancing digitization rather quickly, but the vast majority of small, medium, regional and even some of the biggest museums and herbariums lack the funding to do so. So I can definitely understand someone visiting one of these non-digitized collections who finds an interesting specimen and wants to get it out into the world, even if uploading it here is not the ideal approach. I’ve seen many plant and insect taxa on inaturalist for which the first illustration is a specimen. These images can be crucial to identifying the taxon in living photos, so I don’t think proscribing them is necessarily a good idea. However, I agree with other commenters that true location/collection date should always be used (why mess up locations and phenology for no reason?), and the obs should end up as casual. I’m not sure marking them as nonwild is quite right - is there something else in the DQA that could be used? Maybe downvoting ‘recent evidence of an organism’, the thing used for fossils?
A related interesting question is how to link observations to collections. Many folks now photograph something and then collect it, so some inaturalist observations are living representations of collected material. I’ve experimented with adding inaturalist links/QR codes to herbarium labels, so that you can find the inat obs starting from the collection. But going the other way around (finding the collection starting from the inaturalist observation) is quite difficult, and it seems like everybody uses a different system, with most just writing the collection fieldcode in the description.
iNat’s simply not a platform for hosting scientific collections from institutions, I’m sorry. There’s certainly a need for hosting these things, and I think in North America one can use IDigBio (not sure about elsewhere), but iNat can’t be just a clearinghouse for occurrence data, that’s not what it’s about. See https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/moreaboutinat
Seems almost like the solution there would be to mark the museum observation as captive/cultivated. Yes, it’s not cultivated, per se, but it’s there because someone’s moved it there.
I predict that labeling a museum specimen as captive/cultivated in the DQA is going to result in howls of protest from the average iNat user (who is a “sea lawyer” at heart).
“Why should an organism that was collected in the wild be labelled as captive/cultivated?”
If this is indeed the recommended way of handling this scenario, we need to have this spelled out in plain language somewhere on the iNat website so that identifiers can point offenders to it.
I think it’s one thing to make that argument here in the forum, but quite another to convince someone who has gone to the trouble of posting a specimen on iNat as an observation. Especially if there’s one set of rules for the person posting their own specimen (they are told to use the date/location of collection and their observation can be RG), and another set of rules for the 3rd party (who must use date/location photograph was taken, and their observation is casual).
Unless this is clearly spelled out by iNat, I’m not going to get into squabbles over it.
I agree iNat can’t be used as a repository for other people’s specimen data. I’ve got lots of specimens uploaded, but with very few exceptions, they’re all ones I collected personally. If I’m at someone else’s collection in NYC this weekend and I see a butterfly specimen that I like, my personal encounter with that butterfly took place in NYC this weekend, and it was not wild when I encountered it. That’s how it should be entered if I submit it to iNat, because that’s how an observation is defined. If there’s a label on it that says Joe Schmo collected it 10 years ago in Panama, that’s good occurrence data to put on GBIF. But I can’t just copy that date and location down as an inat observation, because I wasn’t even present 10 years ago in Panama, so I didn’t have any encounters with anything at that time and place. An inat observation is by definition an encounter between the user entering the data and an organism, where the date and time represent where and when that user encountered it. Data read off of a label on someone else’s specimen is useful, but inat isn’t really the place for it. Observations are meant to be first-hand encounters, not second-hand reports of where someone else says they saw something. That’s pretty much spelled out all over the definition of “observation” everywhere it occurs, and these have been given as specific examples on the website as long as I’ve been here.
So upload all the specimens you want if you collected them first-hand. But try to avoid uploading second-hand occurrence reports on a platform that’s explicitly meant for first-hand encounters.
Thanks. I have saved that link in my document that contains frequently cited text that I paste into observations I’m identifying.
But it still doesn’t explicitly cover the scenario where the butterfly is in the display case WITH the appropriately marked date/location (but it was not collected by the observer).
