Let’s put it this way: I will never meet most public figures, but if I see a picture in a news story, I don’t have to second-guess which public figure it is.
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We ID audio of birds on iNat. We learned to identify some birds we had never heard in person (namely, Carolina Wren and Tufted Titmouse). We have since heard them–and learned to recognize them from our efforts identifying them on iNat.
We once found a California Condor photo in the unknowns. Have never seen one in person, and felt pretty confident in what it was.
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Let’s look at this a different way. Sure, the more species we observe and add to iNaturalist and the more observations we add of each of those species, the more both enthusiasts and scientists learn about nature and our planet. But what if many of those observations are never ID’d by more than the one who observed them in person and never down to the species level or worse, identified incorrectly? We might have an observation for a new species or one thought to be extinct and it might never be discovered. Or a species might be introduced in a non-native environment and be mistaken for something endemic or native.
At least a couple of iNat users have performed scientific studies on iNat data that discovered that a large percentile of research grade IDs were actually correct. But I have observed that a fairly low number of identifiers (~122K) performed the identifications of research grade observations added over the past year (~30M). The number of those observations not yet ID’d to research grade is ~25M. That is a lot of work left to be done. I don’t doubt that a lot of the work to get observations to research grade has been done by a relative few people who are scientists or have professional expertise in the IDs they contribute. But still a lot of research grade IDs are the work of amateur enthusiasts. iNat encourages community participation and with good reason for without the global community adding their vast input, how much less would we know? If anything, we need more identifiers on iNat - a lot more, perhaps especially amateur enthusiasts. And remember no matter how great a photograph, or a series of photographs, of an observation is, anything we can glean from it is still going to be highly subjective without the specimen available for testing and preservation. Even for the expert scientists. Which is still useful because the greater the number of observations, especially research grade ones, the more assumptions can be confirmed or refuted with certainty. Regardless of whether someone adding an ID has actually seen a species in person, with only photographs, without testing, it is still subject to that person’s interpretation, very likely with at least some book or internet research done to confirm their opinion. If we were to eliminate the contributions of those who have never seen a species in person, how many of those 30M research grade IDs over the past year do you think would still have been made?
Let’s put this another way. Before iNat, nay before the internet, there were still enthusiasts but a larger percentage of scientific discovery was being done predominantly by the scientific community. Access to information was slow and limited, discovery more challenging, knowledge less and took longer to achieve. Go back further in history and it was far worse. I have worked with groups who examined Medieval and Renaissance art, manuscripts and incunabula to identify plants in them. If you think we here on iNat have a tough time examining high resolution photography of living specimens of extant species, try identifying a plant in a digital scan, albeit a high resolution one, in a Medieval herbal drawn by a Medieval artist with an anthropomorphic and/or religious interpretation, a specimen that may not even have been seen firsthand and may now be extinct. And yet, some such identifications are being achieved and not just by scientists and other experts but by amateur enthusiasts, all without ever necessarily seeing an actual specimen in person.
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iNat has good communication and cooperation between the researcher who published the new taxonomy and the mere humble iNatters who observe, bring their photos, their willingness to learn and help, their generalist IDs.
For example this bluebottle researcher on the journal post
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It depends on the situation. I’d feel pretty comfortable identifying a photo of a walrus, although I’ve never seen one in the flesh. I’m not very comfortable putting a specific name on west coast Brachidontes (scorched mussels) even though I’ve looked at hundreds of them.
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