Goldenrods are tough. I hope there are goldenrod experts on iNaturalist who will examine photos! Judging by the number of observations just identified to “goldenrod” there aren’t enough of them, though.
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I am of the opinion that any data well taken (data, georeference, etc.) is valuable regardless of its age. Having data, or not, of a species for a long time gives us an idea of its evolution and is tremendously valuable for monitoring.
That is my idea.
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I assume I should not post Galapagos photos from 15 years ago? That fauna must be very well documented. Am I correct?
If you know when and where, post them. It’s a special place that deserves lots of documentation.
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Your photos would be welcome, as long as they have dates and locations. No matter how well documented the islands are, more information is always useful.
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I think what @jdjohnson states is valid however he has a professional opinion. He has a better idea than many of us as to what is of value in research. If he were spending time on something that is what he would do - there is an economy of time for him. In general, many of us are getting outside, and in the crawl spaces sometimes, and seeing and enjoying what is there. We post our personal record of this journey as a diary, in some ways. We don’t necessarily know what someone else will glean from that record.
If you have a record of a trip to Galapagos, post away, at your leisure. There are different surrounds, angles, interactions, colours, seasons, weathers, time of day, focuses, exposures, degree of morphology in view, and specifics I can’t think of right now. For every researcher there are untold many of us that could learn from these images just to refine our visual acuity of the subject organism for when we go on that particular dream trip. Some of us concentrate on plants, some of us on animals, some of us on other organisms, some of us are looking at the whole picture. There is so much to glean.
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I never meant to say that old observations should not be posted, I was just suggesting that if someone were trying to prioritize within a large group of old observations, they might focus on underrepresented groups or range extensions instead of starting with species that are well represented.
For instance, I have nearly 30,000 photos of a single species that I surveyed extensively. I will probably not upload all 30,000 to iNat simply due to time constraints and the fact that many of the photos are poor quality. I have uploaded representatives from each location and from the earliest and latest dates I saw the species, to show the full geographic and phenotypic range.
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There are 2 things about iNaturalist that I especially like: it provides a door for people that are not knowledgeable, but interested, to gain access to Nature (gardeners, cottagers and vacationers in foreign lands come to mind), and it provides a very large set of data that can be ‘mined’ by amateurs and professionals alike. With that bias, what comes to mind while reading this theme is that there may be uses for both old observations and frequent observations that people haven’t thought of yet.
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Hell, we need all those 30k of them! At least those identifiable.
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