I am not a scientist nor an expert by any means so I would not feel comfortable offering a critical eye.
I noted that they stated the designated identifiers in their developed group used keys and the website you indicated as identification guides. It made me wonder how I identify in my own garden, where my little Nannotrigona perilampoides or enormous Ptiloglossa or startling Euglossa or funny Frieseomelitta nigra fly up and I just know them even though I have never seen a key or a guide. I realize I know these wonderful bees and all the others because of the identifiers here, who have slowly and patiently taught me to identify them, and for them I am grateful.
I am sorry you are feeling that not all Observers are behaving in a way that shows our immense appreciation. Please consider ignoring those few?
edit to add: to be clear: Ignore in the sense of, “do not pay heed” and certainly please do not allow them to make you feel undervalued. (But I wouldn’t identify for them further.)
I don’t want this to be seen as me angry at all observers, the vast majority are great, and have actively worked with us when trying to figure out difficult observations, and ask when there is an ID disagreement.
However, when annoyances happen, you tend to get more of them, more often, when you have more identifications. Another example was discussed a few months ago, when private observations were discussed. The point was raised that aren’t that many private observations, but when I checked, I run into an average of 3.91 private observations a week, the person who raised the point ran into .89 a week. In this case, deleting observations when there are disagreements is also not common, but I ran into two this week.
On the original point, I have only once run into an observer who deleted an observation in response to IDs they didn’t like, and I’ve never had to dealt with someone re-uploading the deleted observation. @tiwane has good advice, but my willingness to put time into educating someone behaving this way might be very limited.
On the off-track topic, I also read the Turley et al study, even though I know little about bees. And I too was surprised by this statement.
We did not review or attempt to correct any of the identifications in the iNaturalist dataset since our aim was to make comparisons to the iNaturalist data as it was.
I guess it’s not essential to validate identifications in a study that’s comparing citizen science data to collections, but it certainly massively reduces the value of the study.
If they had chosen to independently determine IDs for the 6,809 research grade observations in their dataset (in the same way as they did for the 9,062 bees from collections), then they could have drawn some distinct conclusions about the usefulness of iNat observations independent of the iNat identification process. Their study included these conclusions:
At state and county levels, we found collections data documented over twice as much biodiversity and novel baseline natural history data (state and county records) than data from iNaturalist. iNaturalist data showed strong biases toward large-bodied and non-native species.
But in fact they don’t know how much those effects are due to the difference in the collections process, or the limited info provided in photographs, or the limited skills/availability of identifiers, or some combination of those factors.
I was very unimpressed by that paper, and just a bit insulted, the authors “thanked” the top ten identifiers by the usernames, they couldn’t take the trouble to click the profiles. Lines discussing the “likely mis-ID’s” in the iNat set while they did no verification, and then used out-dated keys on the specimens but talked about how great they were irked me.
I don’t feel at all qualified to judge scientific merit… however I will note that one process difference that is very important to me is that observing for iNaturalist does not require killing our bees.
Perhaps iNat will benefit from ‘no such thing as bad publicity’.
They have heard of us … and some must come over to the dark side, to find out which set of hype is true.
One day the peer review will include an active and competent iNatter.
In the last couple of years I’ve reviewed 10-12 journal papers focused on iNat data. Some are good, some not so good, just like you get in any discipline. I always ensure in my reviews that, in addition to my more substantive feedback, I also correct errors or misconceptions involving eg what constitutes Research Grade, how obscuration works. But there are plenty of very high quality iNat papers out there, including a great deal where the authors are also regular iNat users. It’s just that the not so great ones tend to stand out more and attract more attention
It’s like an old adage you often hear in cricket or football: when a goalkeeper or wicketkeeper plays an exceptional game, you don’t hear anything about it. But when they have a terrible game, they’re crucified and you certainly know about it from the media and commentators. We need to be better at celebrating the really good research and work, of which there is plenty, in addition to also critiquing the less accomplished works
We’re swinging a bit off the original topic here now - but I have to say that on the marine side of things at least, there really are a lot of people who are very engaged in active research, taxonomy, curation et al. and who are true experts in their fields, who are all quite active on inat and in some cases actively using it as part of that work.
It was people like that who encouraged me to come here and post some of the things I was curious to know more about as observations - and despite my initial prejudiced skepticism of the "social media"ness of it, it has proven to be a priceless tool for connecting the people who study things with the people who get to watch them the most or see them in unexpected places or doing unexpected things.
So as much as I think the drains of knowledge are clogged with the fatbergs of terrible papers written by people who probably should be doing something else, and as much as I will continue to (perhaps not here :) scathingly excoriate the lazy thinking in them and the shallow foolish conclusions they hope will impress the people they hope will read them - I do and must reject the idea that there’s an “us and them” chasm between “people on inat” and “serious, careful, researchers”.
There’s terrible and remarkable people in both those camps. Probably in about equal measures. And there’s a lot of very precious people spending quality time in both of them. They may not be equally spread across all taxon classes, but neither is anything else.
There is no dark side, there’s just the cloud of ignorance that can cast shade on any of us without fear or favour if we fail to keep a careful eye on the weather :D
Yikes!! That’s not very responsible science, although I can understand having to wade through so much data and verify that everything is correct is a whole other job in itself.
Not sure where you get that. I have a string of helpful scientists to @mention on iNat.
We have the beach comber bridging the gap - as a shining example.
Attention focuses on the one rotten apple that makes the news.
@DianaStuder Unless I am misreading, I believe the statement is a rejection of any such separation between two groups, as shown by this sentence that follows shortly thereafter:
I uploaded an observation a few days ago and was wildly wrong with the ID. Someone who I respect a lot didn’t agree with my ID and bumped it back to Magnoliopsida. As soon as I looked at my own photos I realised my ID was wildly incorrect and I couldn’t work out how I came up with the ID in the first place. I was embarrassed but I didn’t even consider deleting the observation (but maybe this is why some people might). The conversation that followed was valuable, everybody involved was respectful and I learned some things, so that’s good. I’ve never met an expert who has not on occasion gotten an ID wrong and making a mistake is human. If we learn from these mistakes and there’s a constructive conversation then that’s a good thing. I’m still embarrassed, but these things happen
In the world of software, bugs like that are a Thing Of Wonder.
You wonder “how did this ever work??” - which it somehow appeared to, sometimes for many years, until someone (maybe even you!) observed that it couldn’t possibly ever have, at which point it then stubbornly no longer does …
And you wonder “what on earth was I thinking when I wrote this?”.
But the you who wrote it is a thing of the past - as lost to today’s world as all of the other antiquities we only have fragments of evidence to build a story from. And since most of the past is embarrassing if you look at it hard enough - it only becomes A Thing Of Shame if you dig your heels in and don’t learn from it, compost it, and grow!
I owe everything I think I know to making lots and lots of mistakes :D It’s not a human failing, it’s fundamentally how we learn.
There is a glitch, when I click for That species, it catches the second on the list. Working back thru the 10 year old backlog, I see that issue was always a problem on iNat. I never clicked that, I wouldn’t, never HEARD of it!
(Delete the mistaken ID, if nobody has engaged with it yet - but not the whole obs)
Yeah that happens as well :) I guess what I was trying to say is that I admire people more if they leave a misidentifcation than if they try to erase it from history. Like my observation which I got totally wrong; I’m embarrassed but I’m not ashamed (it would have been nice to get the family right though haha)
Two very common mistakes in Bombus are finding Bombus pratorum or Bombus terrestris in North America. When you type Pyrobombus, the next one in the dropdown menu is Bombus pratorum, we’ve all accidentally clicked that, especially with how often a Pyrobombus ID is added. Bombus terrestris gets two opportunities to get clicked on: you type Bombus ter, intending to select terricola or ternarius, and click terrestris. Happens all the time.
Just a moderator note to please avoid calling out specific users, researchers, etc. on the forum. This thread has veered into that territory by targeting a specific paper and the authors multiple times now. Thanks.
