Optimal recruitment

General
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recently on youtube i uncovered a “new” ficus species in the himalayas… ficus timlada. this isn’t a straightforward new species case like someone posting pics of a butterfly that experts had never seen before. in the ficus case, basically the taxonomic system failed because it’s fundamentally flawed.

in my paper i mentioned an expert by the name of D [name withheld for privacy]. i emailed him my paper and he replied that he was excited about the possibility of a new ficus species, but that he wouldn’t be able to look into it until he finished editing a 400 page submission to the journal that he’s an editor of. eh? that’s a book though! he said he probably wouldn’t be finished until the end of december.

i think we’re all familiar with the batman bat signal? the city is under attack by a silly villain like the penguin, so the mayor shines a huge bat spotlight in the sky. batman sees the signal and drops whatever it is that he’s doing and rushes to save the city. naturally the bat signal doesn’t work so well during the day. it’s ok though because villains, like bats, are nocturnal creatures.

bees also have to worry about recruitment. i’m not a bee expert by any means, so any bee experts are welcome to correct me, but here’s my basic understanding of bee recruitment. a bee discovers a huge patch of aloe flowers so she rushes back to the hive to recruit bees, because many hands make light work. she does a dance that communicates 3 things… distance, direction and desirability. the more valuable the patch, the harder she dances, which sacrifices many of her precious calories, which effectively proves to the onlooking bees that she must have made an important discovery. some of the onlooking bees are inspired to inspect the patch, gather pollen/nectar, and fly back to do their own recruiting. and so on and so on.

ok, so i should record myself dancing energetically for as long as possible and send it to hodel. the person who submitted the 400 page palm manuscript should do the same. then hodel can compare the two dances and decide whether he’s most urgently needed at the palm patch or the ficus patch.

sadly, calories aren’t as precious for us humans as they are for bees. what’s precious for us is money.

It is thus that the private interests and passions of individuals naturally dispose them to turn their stocks towards the employments which in ordinary cases are most advantageous to the society. But if from this natural preference they should turn too much of it towards those employments, the fall of profit in them and the rise of it in all others immediately dispose them to alter this faulty distribution. Without any intervention of law, therefore, the private interests and passions of men naturally lead them to divide and distribute the stock of every society among all the different employments carried on in it as nearly as possible in the proportion which is most agreeable to the interest of the whole society. — Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

i had to read this passage quite a few times before it made sense to me.

when e.g. palms are being supplied or studied by few people, then their big profit recruits more people to supply/study palms. but if too many people are recruited to palms then their profit will start to shrink, which will motivate people to switch to more profitable plants, like ficus. and so on. it’s a feedback loop.

this is a very important concept so let me try to make it as accessible as possible. optimal recruitment is a function of traffic lights, in a sense. each and every field has a traffic light the color of which is determined by consumers. if consumers want to maximize recruitment to ficus, they spend a lot of money on ficus, which creates a green traffic light. if consumers want to slow recruitment to palms, they spend less money on palms, which creates a yellow traffic light. and if consumers want to stop recruitment to agaves, they stop spending money on agaves, which creates a red traffic light.

the common perception of wages is that their main function is compensation. nope. the true usefulness of wages has to do with communication in terms of recruitment… they signal and direct the flow of talent to where it is most needed. with this correct view of wages, red lights are just as important as green lights. too many people doing something is just as problematic as too few people doing something else.

there can only be one correct theory of optimal recruitment. this theory is equally relevant for beehives, the global economy and inaturalist.

here on inaturalist, 9 days ago i found this observation of a big ficus tree in bhutan. there were 3 ids from a year ago, and they all said the tree was ficus racemosa. i took a closer look at the pic and saw the highly distinct long drip tip of a ficus religiosa leaf. so i submitted it as an id and learned for the 1st time about the maverick thing. 9 days later i’m not sure if anything has happened. it feels like something should have happened. were the 3 previous identifiers notified? were the ficus experts notified? are there any ficus experts on here? am i a ficus expert? would it matter if i was?

if experts had weighted votes, this would result in less nurturing? seems like a rather strong claim, so i’d hope that someone could provide credible sources to support it.

here are a couple facts…

  1. inaturalist needs more experts
  2. inaturalist needs more funding

therefore, donations to inaturalist should be used to create traffic lights to signal which experts are most needed on inaturalist. of course i’d donate for ficus. how much would i donate? how many others would donate for ficus? who would donate the most for ficus? let’s imagine the total donations for ficus and palms…

ficus: $746
palms: $30

i’d show this to D and he’d immediately drop the 400 page palm manuscript and rush here to help out with ficus. actually, i wouldn’t be surprised if much more money was donated for palms than ficus. which group of organisms would people donate the most money for? we can guess, but the only way to know, would be to give everyone the opportunity to use donations to signal which experts are most needed on inaturalist.

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As is the case in unregulated capitalism, this would serve to increase inequality, as high-resource countries, which are already well-studied, could muster more large donors than low-resource countries, which are already understudied.

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With your ficus observation, you have other options including tagging someone who knows about ficus or flora of the region who is also willing to be tagged, or check the box that says yes to “Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?”
You might have to be the expert you are looking for or recruit someone to be that expert.
Also I think it is forum rules that you are not supposed to link specific observations, but I don’t know exactly.

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donors are mainly going to donate for plants and animals in their own country?

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That rule applies to cases where it could be construed as calling out bad behavior.

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It’s possible. If not, what else would they donate to? Probably things they personally care about and–vitally–only those they are aware of in the first place. So the mammals, birds, etc. may receive high donations. But what of the groups with little existing awareness? What about the less charismatic species? What of all those that are largely unknown?

There’s a lot that could be said about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation here, though I don’t feel like diving too deep down the rabbit hole. However, I’d suggest looking at current donation-based conservation funding through groups like NGOs to get a sense for how it can start to feel like a bit of a popularity contest rather than a stoplight.

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My sense is that generally, whenever funding or investment is dictated by popularity (which means it’s dictated by awareness, which means it’s dictated by the interests of existing power structures and existing cultural and social biases) or prior investment, the results are, to put things far more politely than I’m inclined to… counterproductive to a healthy and equitable intellectual ecosystem.

There’s already substantial discussion in conservation about the political and financial neglect suffered by taxa that aren’t “charismatic”. I don’t think iNaturalist should institutionalize systems that risk perpetuating those same problems. If there’s a need to get identifiers and experts for specific taxa, there are other ways to identify those taxa and reach out to those experts than relying on a popularity contest.

It’s not like it’s hard to find which experts are needed without relying a popularity contest; we can start from a list of percentages of RG observations per taxa of a given rank, qualify that list based on how difficult those taxa are to identify from photos, and try to work out where the biggest gaps in coverage are from there.

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let’s say that voting is used to rank plants and animals based on their need for expert attention. this would be tyranny of the majority.

if, instead of voting, donations were used to rank plants and animals based on their need for expert attention, this would be tyranny of the minority.

when it comes to ficus timlada, it would be ranked way higher with donations than with democracy. all the little known plants and animals would be ranked way higher with donations than with democracy. again, this is simply because democracy is tyranny of the majority, and the majority of people do not know about ficus timlada or any of the other little known organisms.

let’s say the biggest gap in coverage is with rolly pollies. you present this result to the subject matter experts, and they are so motivated by the size of the gap, they immediately drop whatever it is they are doing and start identifying all the unidentified rolly polly observations? in this scenario, how many rolly polly experts are there anyways? just the right amount?

with my approach, if you truly want rolly pollies to get more attention, you make a donation for rolly pollies. the bigger the total donation, the greater the motivation for college students to become rolly polly experts.

supply and demand is a big thing. if you have the belief that researchers are, or should be, an exception to supply and demand, you’d have to show quite a bit of really good economics work to substantiate your belief.

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Supply and demand is indeed a big thing. While I won’t posit that researchers are excepted to this pattern (that would indeed require an exceptional amount of evidence), their very existence suggests that it is not their sole or even largest motivation. If it was, why would anyone waste their time becoming an expert in a specific taxonomic group with limited resources versus, say, opening their own business? Or working at a bank? Or any other job that is likely to provide more stability and income?

Let me ask a question in response: why do you seem so dedicated to ignoring intrinsic motivation? Why wouldn’t the person remain dedicated to editing the 400-page submission simply because they wanted to and/or found it interesting, even if other options–even more lucrative ones–existed?

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Ficus timlada won’t be looking so hot when a TikTok influencer convinces their 850,000 followers to donate for monarch butterflies because they watched a sad Netflix documentary, or when Elon Musk loses a yacht and decides to take a PR win by plopping $50 million onto orcas.

But hey, it’s all about supply and demand, isn’t it? What good are the isopod researchers, anyway; lets shake the coin jar until they switch over to monarchs.

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Patience is the name of the game, both here on iNat (regarding the observation you corrected), and in sciences in general.

No matter what this fellow is not going to put aside his palm work to jump onto pursuing what you want him to. He likely has a deadline as well as a bunch of obligations such based around this, not only on his part but on the part of a lot of other people too. This latter part means that there is also a lot tied up on the economic side of his current work, with none on your side at the moment, so your economic model falls apart there too.

He has expressed his interest and has said he will look into it very soon, the end of December.

I suspect that you may not appreciate just how absurdly fast that is in an academic and research setting. Often this takes years to get going.

Take the win and sit back and be patient. For you it’s a big exciting thing and you want everything right now and thing it’s supremely important, but for everyone else, including experts in the field, it’s an interesting possibility that should be looked into when they have time among all the other interesting and important (to them, their sponsoring agencies, students, etc, etc) work they have.

Even stuff that is a known and widely recognized and accepted global priority can take years to get going. As an example, I work with one of the most endangered primates in the world and everyone who is aware of this species and working in primatology or genetics agreed that doing a proper genetic analysis of them was of critical importance… back in 2014. It took until the year before last (2022) to finally get the analysis done, and the paper didn’t get published until this year.

Be patient. Things take time.

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my 44 page report on ficus timlada wasn’t based on supply and demand, it was solely and entirely based on intrinsic motivation.

here’s an extreme example to help pump your intuition. you’re on a beach wholly and entirely focused on making observations of various sand critters. unbeknownst to you, there’s someone in the ocean drowning. if you looked up you’d be able to see them. but since you don’t look up you don’t see them.

my only argument is to look up. if you see the person drowning, and still decide to continue with your observations of sand critters, well, that’s your prerogative.

supply and demand is already here on inaturalist. we just can’t see it, but it exists. everyone gets a certain amount of benefit from other people’s work. this benefit exists, but we can’t see it. if we could see it, and it turned out there was a huge demand for observations and ids of rolly pollies, but you preferred to continue with your sand critter observations, well, that would be your prerogative. except, you couldn’t pretend that your sand critter observations are more valuable to people than they actually were. you would see and know the demand for sand critter observations. we all would.

x = doing what you want, without knowing how much it benefits others
y = doing what you want, with knowing how much it benefits others

there’s a fun study involving stranded motorists pretending to need help with having their tire changed. one group of stranded motorists offered good samaritans nothing in exchange for their assistance. a second group offered the good samaritans a candy bar for their help. a third group offered the good samaritans a dollar. the 1st and 2nd groups had roughly the same amount of assistance, but the 3rd group had considerably less assistance. what happened? with the 1st and 2nd group, the samaritans could pretend that their assistance was very valuable to the stranded motorist. but this was not the case with the third group.

right now, with your hypothetical observations of sand critters, sure you’re intrinsically motivated, but a huge part of that motivation is your ability to pretend that you’re doing something that is greatly beneficial to society. but if we could all see the actual demand for sand critter observations, it might turn out there is only $1 worth of demand for them. in this case you really couldn’t pretend that what you’ve spent a big chunk of your life working on is greatly beneficial to others.
but nothing would stop you from continuing to spend your time barking up the sand critter tree, but you would know that, from society’s perspective, it was the really wrong tree.

naturally it’s entirely possible that you know something about sand critters that the rest of society does not. maybe society has been greatly underestimating the value of the sand critter tree that you’ve been barking up. in this case, well, you’ve got your work cut out for you. you are the informed very tiny minority and everyone else is the uninformed vast majority. the more people you manage to inform, the greater the demand for sand critter observations.

thanks to inaturalist, i learned that there’s a special ficus tree a few miles from me. when i visited the tree it blew my mind in the best possible way. it filled me with a sense of wonder that i hadn’t felt in a long time. the considerable benefit i felt from the observation is something that i could keep hidden. but doing so really wouldn’t benefit me or anyone else. so i should have the opportunity to reveal my benefit and quantify it using a donation to inaturalist. if we all had this opportunity then i guarantee that the result would be nothing short of magical. our love for nature would be impossible for the rest of society to ignore. nature appreciation would quickly become a much higher priority for society. all we have to do is not hide away our love for nature.

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patience is for the birds. it’s cool that you’re working on one of the rarest primates in the world, but do you fully appreciate why, exactly, humans are the most common primate in the world? it’s simply because when we hybridized with neanderthals in southern europe, the cold tolerance traits we borrowed from them allowed us to colonize colder environments, and the rest of the world. the adaptive benefits of hybridization is something that the majority of people, and way too many biologists and botanists, still haven’t fully appreciated. so in the uk they killed a bunch of feral cats in a completely misguided and counterproductive effort to save the scottish wildcat. in reality they should have done the complete opposite, like how the florida cougars were mixed with the texas cougars.

we humans should be the very last organism to care about purity.

and sure, i can spam all the relevant studies everywhere, but that’s not nearly as effective as making a donation to make it marginally more difficult for the rest of the world to overlook them.

1950 is when ira condit published his paper about his successful crossing of two ficus species… carica and pumila. this was the 1st time that anyone had ever hybridized any ficus. but it wasn’t until 2012, that a paper was published about the 2nd ever successful crossing of two ficus species, in this case carica and erecta.

why the huge pause in progress? basically, nobody had the opportunity to use their donations to say, “stand on condit’s shoulders!”

sure, finding the best shoulders to stand on takes time. but it would take far less time if we used donations, rather than scholarly citations (aka democracy), to rank shoulders by benefit.

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that same logic has us at - our priority is squarely on - Can I eat it?

Livestock make up 62% of the world’s mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%.

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x = buying an animal to eat
y = observing an animal for inaturalist

x is a private good. y is a public good. if they were on a level playing field, then we wouldn’t need taxes. we could reasonably expect people to voluntarily contribute an amount of money for public goods that accurately reflects the amount of benefit they derive from them.

taxes exist because when it comes to public goods, the problem of free-riding is a real problem. people voluntarily contribute far less money than they should, and could, for public goods. as a result, public goods are undersupplied, but not equally so.

since inaturalist is a public good, it’s 100% guaranteed that the amount of donations it receives is far less than the amount of benefit it provides. we could easily solve this problem if we were simply given the opportunity to use donations to help rank observations and ids by their benefit.

so you’re 100% correct that people spend a lot more money on eating animals than on appreciating them. but this really doesn’t mean what you think it means. it just means that the playing field isn’t level. if the playing field between private goods and public goods was completely level, and people still spent more money on eating animals than on appreciating them, then and only then, would it mean what you think it means.

here’s my best guess. inaturalist gives us the opportunity to use our donations to help prioritize observations and ids. this makes it obvious what markets are good for. in this case we’re quickly given the opportunity to use our own tax dollars to help prioritize things like conservation, healthcare and space exploration. we start getting more and more benefit from the public sector, so people prefer paying more and more taxes. when the tax rate is 50%, the playing field between x (buying animals to eat) and y (observing animals on inaturalist) is perfectly level. at this point, more and more restaurants are replaced with soup kitchens, and the tax rate continues to go up until it’s 100%. everything is a public good. no more buying food, clothes, cars or homes. admittedly i’m not sure how it would work for homes to be free. then again, it took me a while to appreciate how soup kitchens could replace restaurants. anyways, this is my best guess. i’m just pretty sure that, in the right context, donating can provide a more accurate measure of our benefit than buying, which would allow producers in the public sector to make better informed decisions.

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If it pays, it stays.
No, thank you.
https://news.mongabay.com/2019/02/it-pays-but-does-it-stay-hunting-in-namibias-community-conservation-system/

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hey @epiphyte78 , I appreciate your passion, but I think you’re overstepping some boundaries in your enthusiasm. the role of economics in the world of science, both academic and citizen-driven, is significant of course on a large scale. but please remember that iNaturalist is meant to be an egalitarian space for mutual learning, not a race or contest.

In an ideal world, every would-be scientist could be fully funded by a network of institutions and passionate individuals. for every species, there’s bound to be at least a few people who, if they could afford to do so, would love to dedicate their wholes lives to studying.

but real life is a lot more complicated. economics and sociology are really complicated and I can’t pretend I have exhaustive knowledge on either topic.

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right now you have the opportunity to decide how you divide your donation dollars between inaturalist and wikipedia. how do you feel about this opportunity? i’m asking sincerely, in good faith.

the reason that i’m asking is because there’s no real difference between the following two opportunities…

  1. dividing your donations between wikipedia and inaturalist
  2. dividing your donations within inaturalist between plants and animals

since there’s no real difference between these two opportunities, it’s a real conundrum if someone wants the 1st opportunity but not the 2nd.

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I guess that one of my sticking points here (among many–this conversation has a lot of threads that feel loosely connected) is what’s being valued. Money is not the only form of currency, so to speak.

To mirror your conundrum, what’s the real difference between the following opportunities:

  1. Dividing your donations between Wikipedia and iNaturalist
  2. Dividing your time as a volunteer between writing/editing Wikipedia entries and observing/identifying on iNaturalist

Both clearly indicate your priorities, no?

A lot of your argument seems to follow a utilitarian theory–do what provides the most benefit. Put this simply, it’s hard to argue to the contrary. But utilitarianism as a whole has a difficulty that’s hard to overcome: trying to predict total outcomes is insanely difficult in reality, and deciding what counts as a benefit is tricky in a world of unknowns.

There seems to be an implicit assumption in this thread that your paper provides inherently more benefit than the palm paper, and maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. Frankly, we could probably publish both simultaneously and still continue the debate for decades as their impact slowly filtered through the scientific community and the rest of society–it would take years to know for sure, and even then our definitions as to what counts as the benefits provided by each paper could differ.

The last paragraph of your response to me seems a bit revealing to why I sort of bristle at a lot of your arguments (which, to be clear, is not an emotional response to you, just to specific arguments):

What you’re describing here to me doesn’t seem to be related to economic theory or donations. It’s education. Sharing our passion for nature, lobbying for what we value and what we think others should, acting as “the informed very tiny minority”… that’s what outreach, engagement, and education are all about (especially related to conservation). If you donated some amount of money towards the ficus, I would not personally receive that information nearly the way I did your paragraph I quoted. Sure, it would signal some level of interest–but not passion.

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Also, society can look forward to a slightly increased production of ‘philosophy’, that is, more articles and/or books in philosophy - added to the tens of thousands of such articles that are already being produced every year, and already going almost completely unnoticed because we have thousands of times more of them than any human being could read. - Mike Huemer, Huemer on Ultra-Ineffective Altruism

this is just in terms of philosophy, if we try and imagine all the other scholarly papers published on a yearly basis in all the other fields of study, it’s like a mount everest of papers. onto this impossibly giant mountain, let’s pile on all the articles, blog entries, forum posts, digitized books, inaturalist observations and ids, instagram pics and youtube videos, which include countless lectures and presentations about countless topics. does all of this make the mountain of information 10,000x times larger? compare this mountain, if not an entire planet, of information to my one relatively small paragraph about my excitement and joy of finding a crazy cool local ficus tree thanks to one inaturalist observer.

you saw my paragraph, but i’m pretty sure that even most people who’ve read any part of this thread have not.

there’s a paradox of sorts. the internet has made it incredibly easier to share things, but since there are so many things being shared every second of every day, it guarantees that we all consistently and constantly overlook really important things.

what we need is data about the data, in other words, metadata. you’re right that money spent isn’t the only possible metadata about importance. we could compare all the hours people donate to improving inaturalist and compare it to all the hours people donate to improving wikipedia. the reason i wouldn’t trust this metadata is because of youtube. youtube already tracks views and this seems to strongly influence the ranking. but the ranking is incredibly atrocious. the most viewed content is so bad that i wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies. the vast majority of people with time to spare aren’t spending it on anything remotely resembling self-improvement. this encourages the production of even more useless content, and the result is a vicious cycle of ignorance.

to break the cycle, here on inaturalist we should have the opportunity to make donations for the observations and ids we love the most. this would provide the most useful possible metadata about everyone’s contributions, and it would result in optimal recruitment and education.

in traditional education grades are a thing. education and feedback are two sides of the same coin. we need the opportunity to grade each other’s work, but with money instead of letters. the observer who found that local ficus, i’m supposed to give him a “a++++”? no, that would be silly. we’re beyond that. what i’m supposed to do is make a big sacrifice.

a while back my neighbor from el salvador randomly made me the best bowl of caldo de res (beef soup) i’ve ever had in my life. but in doing so, she essentially put me in considerable debt to her. naturally that wasn’t her intention, but that was the consequence of her thoughtfulness. when i was eating the soup, enjoying it immensely, i was thinking how i was going to pay her back. not sure how i paid her back, maybe i gave her a big bag of persimmons.

this guy who observed the local ficus didn’t even know i exist. he wasn’t trying to be thoughtful or considerate, but that doesn’t change the fact that he did me an impossibly huge favor. now i’m deeply in debt to him. if i gave his observation 5 stars or a thumbs up this really wouldn’t cut it in my book, or the book of anyone who was taught to reciprocate good deeds. and there’s no practical opportunity to spend time reciprocating somehow. therefore, money. i should have the opportunity to sacrifice enough money to get out of debt to him. in this case he wouldn’t get the money, inaturalist would, but he would see my sacrifice and so would anyone else who saw his observation.

naturally, with this system of sacrifice in place, anybody in california even vaguely interested in ficus would sort their observations by sacrifice. the 1st result would be the wondrous ficus tree. or maybe it wouldn’t be. i don’t know how highly it would be ranked. this ignorance is what bristles me. it’s the worst of the worst of the most worst that i can’t currently see and know which ficus tree in california is worth the biggest collective sacrifice. this ignorance is the complete opposite of bliss. in fact, it’s incredibly scary.

last year i stumbled on this 1985 article in the la times… Horticulturist Mounts Opposition : Street Widening to Fell Rare Tree. i emailed “d” and wrote…

if i had known about that tree at the time i would have chained myself to it! since i was 7 years old i’m sure this would have saved the tree. coincidentally, while i was reading the article, in the other room [“m”] was watching a korean drama show by the name of “the extraordinary attorney woo” and the episode she was watching was about the main character’s effort to save an old hackberry tree from development. what i learned just now is that the tree featured in the show is real…

https://deadline.com/2022/08/extraordinary-attorney-woo-tree-natural-monument-korea-netflix-1235099930/

let’s imagine if inaturalist had been around back in 1985. it’s reasonable to guess that there would have been an observation for “d’s” specimen ficus elastica tree. but what difference would this observation have made? not a lick of difference. even a correct id would not have made a difference. ignorance of the tree’s identity was not the problem. so the magnificent tree would have been destroyed anyways.

ignorance was definitely the problem though, but specifically: ignorance of the tree’s worth to society. if “d” had been given the opportunity to donate for the tree’s observation on inaturalist, let’s say he donated $500. let’s go out on a limb and say that a total of $2724 was donated for this tree. in the grand scheme of things this doesn’t sound like much. but if the city officials had searched inaturalist for "ficus elastica"and they sorted the observations by importance, they would have learned that this particular specimen was the most valuable ficus elastica tree in california. and maybe america. and possibly even the world. in this case, if the tree was still destroyed, whoever ultimately approved the decision would go down in infamy as the person responsible for destroying the most valuable and important ficus elastica in the world. we’d put this on their tombstone, and at the top of their wikipedia entry.

“d” is a subject matter expert about ficus. he could literally write a book about ficus elastica. but what he couldn’t tell the city officials was that specific tree’s value to society. and this is the biggest possible problem for anyone even vaguely interested in nature. inaturalist could easily solve this problem.

here’s another historical example that is also particularly close to my heart. southern california used to have only one species of freshwater shrimp… syncaris pasadenae, but it’s now extinct because its last remaining habitat was bulldozed so that the rose bowl could be built. more or less. nowadays there would have been environmental impact studies and so on. but no amount of impact studies can reveal what a species of shrimp or anything is worth to us. until we realize how problematic this ignorance is, we’re essentially shooting ourselves, and nature, in the foot. both feet. and both hands. perhaps eventually in the head if a tipping point is reached.

the wondrous ficus is on public land, but obviously it’s a non-native species. all it would take is some pro-native [self-censored] people to rally the city to have it removed and replaced with a california poppy. of course i’d chain myself to the tree, but there’s a much more civilized and practical way to reveal the tree’s value to me and the rest of society. it simply involves making a donation to inaturalist, specifically for the tree’s observation.

“d” hasn’t seen this ficus tree yet. i told him that there’s a tree in my area that he has to see next chance he gets, which is evidently after december, because of his palm obligations. “d” asked me to send him pics and i was like “nope”. when he finally sees the tree in person it’s going to blow his scholarly socks off. he’s gonna really regret not seeing it sooner. and i’d be surprised if he didn’t write an article about it, that might be seen by a small handful of ficus nerds, but is mainly going to be lost in the planet size mountain of other articles, forum posts and all the other information on the internet. what “d” should have is the opportunity to quantify his excitement for this tree using a donation to inaturalist. this will make the tree marginally harder to overlook on inaturalist. and it might end being the most important ficus tree in california. who knows. for all i know there’s an even more wondrous ficus tree somewhere in california that i and others have overlooked. clearly i want to allocate more eyeballs to the task of finding extra-ordinary ficus trees here in california.

i’d feel remiss not to mention the iconic tree in england that was chopped down last year in an act of vandalism… “the sycamore gap tree”. didn’t notice a wikipedia entry for it, but i’m sure it has plenty of observations on inaturalist. is it easy to find them? hmmm, let me check… voila. that was easy enough. i thought that there would be more observations. if inaturalist had given everyone the opportunity to donate for this tree’s observations, would it still have been chopped down? the vandals most likely would not have seen the tree’s worth to society, but maybe the city officials would have. and the higher the tree’s worth, the more prudent it would have been to protect the tree somehow. even if the tree had still been destroyed, we’d know the least amount of money the vandals would have to pay. knowing this would influence how much money we’d donate for the trees we love the most.

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