It is valuable if other observers visit the same spot within weeks…they can do excellent guesses
One of the great abilities now with digital cameras is the amount of photos you can take looking for that “great” photo. When you had a film camera, taking lots of shots and getting them developed got expensive quick. That is one aspect that digital has made a huge improvement on.
I would not take a photo from a moving car, because I know ahead of time, I am not going to get a good photo. I would however turn around/U-turn, whatever to pull off to the side of the road, if that was possible. That is just my own personal preference, not a reflection on anyone else. But I hope the person is a passenger and not the driver, as otherwise you have a safe driving issue.
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That may be the case for sessile organisms but I sure have a lot of accidentally empty or blurry photos of moving ones. Also as said above not everyone is a pro at their camera settings.
I don’t really see photo quality as closely related to the number of observations most people make. If anything the people who make more observations generally have reasonable quality photos because they know what it takes to make observations identifiable.
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The topic has gotten sidetracked. I looked at someone’s observations, that in my opinion seemed to just be a lot of redundancy of the same thing and with what I would call poor photos. It just made me wonder what their objective was. Just to clarify, I don’t count a photo as poor quality, if it is in focus and I can see the observation.
I agree about moving animals. I have many a photo of blank skies, empty trees, “blobs” etc. But like I said, that’s a great advantage now to digital, at least I don’t have to pay for pictures of blob anymore.
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I wouldn’t call myself an expert per se, but I’m the second to top plant identifier in my county and third to top idenifier in the county over all. Do low quality observations frustrate me? Sometimes, but not very much. It can get frustrating if I make effort to politely suggest better behavior and they don’t understand/care, but if I don’t feel like bothering, then it’s easy just to hit “reviewed” on excessively bad photos and move on. I can only think of one instance when a specific individual user annoyed me, and I ended up doing a search filter for his user name to bulk mark his 100+ images as reviewed. He was taking pan shots of his yard and public landscaping with no focus on any particular organism.
So what does annoy me? Certain overly popular locations, where I’ve seen every plant photographed from two dozen angles. Usually school gardens or parks next to schools, and the local world-famous amusement park.
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A significant portion of the lower quality pictures submitted come from students assigned to use the site, who in many cases only have access to a cell phone for their photography and/or don’t give a toss about what they are submitting because they just want to get it over with as quickly as possible.
No guidelines or rules are going to do anything about that use case.
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I get fatigued by the repetitiveness, even if the school project is good quality. Right now for example, a high school near me is running probably a whole grade level of students through their garden of low-water-use and native plants. The garden is nice and the instructors seem to understand iNat well. No one has taken pictures of their friends, the sky, bare dirt, or 15 plants in one frame. Only a few kids have tried to observe rocks, and maybe two have made the “10 pictures, each with a different organism, all on one obs” mistake. They are even making a great effort to avoid uploading things as “unknown.” I’m proud of them, really, but the 25th photo of the same mallow gets a old! I’ve strayed from the topic a bit here… my main points are 1) individual users don’t annoy me but 2) yes ID fatigue is real.
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Good on you, @arboretum_amy , for persevering through all that!
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You can always ask them. Nobody here will have an answer to that question.
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This is an example of what I think you’ve described: In June, I posted ~20 western azalea observations in a roughly 2-3 acre area because I wanted to see the dot map of that species in that area. Because these are perennials, I probably won’t post multiple observations of the same individuals unless I thought it would be worthwhile , for example, to have a record of time of bloom or leaf drop over the years. I appreciated that all of these observations were ID’d. Are these legitimate reasons for multiple observations in iNat of the same species/different individuals? I’m a relative beginner, so am trying to figure out where my observations are a benefit to the community but can also answer some of my own questions.
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Yes, totally! There is no requirement that one’s observations be of value to anyone else, as long as they follow the broad iNaturalist guidelines. But it’s a rare case that they would have no value to anyone else. Post what works for you, and most likely others will find them of value also.
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Yes, just follow the guidelines and all is okay. Others have the ability to not look at observations of others at all, or to filter them for their needs, or take a quick glance, hit “review,” and move on, if someone else’s observation doesn’t interest them, so don’t worry about them. They are the ones choosing what to spend time looking at on here and no one else is responsible for their choices.
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I keep track of the individual toads I see in my yard (I identify them based on markings) and I have encountered the same individual on three separate occasions. I have often wondered if I should submit new observations or update the original observation of this animal. I suppose I have my answer now, thank you!
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I post an observation of every individual Texas Cichlid I catch b/c they are invasive here and I think it’s important to document their prevalence.
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Invasive species documentation is a very good reason for doing so!
Side note: Didn’t realize there was a native US cichlid.
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That is so cool! You can find out how long they live in your yard, how many individuals are present, whether they stay or return in future years. Sounds like a great project. Certainly you can post these. When you meet the same individual on a different date, the best thing is to post it as a different observation, and (if you can) link it to other observations of the same individual.
For linking, I think there’s a simpler way to do it, but I copy the URL of one photo and paste in into the comments for the other. Others here can explain better.
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Yes, I second @jdmore here - this is a fine use case for iNaturalist. Do what you enjoy doing, and if it’s following the guidelines on iNat, it’s not a problem.
Using an observation field like “unique_ID” with the “name” of the individual frog would probably be best. Easier to maintain multiple sightings that way.
Meet bob:https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?field:unique_ID=bob&place_id=any&quality_grade=any
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This one is easy… the observations that you post are useful to the community, and the ones you don’t post aren’t.
We can make some amazing discoveries when we observe nature, but the problem is we don’t know in advance what those amazing discoveries will be.
One of the replies above mentions observing toads, and in particular their markings so as to identify specific individuals. This is a hypothetical, but imagine that science understands this particular species to only live 5 years, but a scientist sees these observations and notices that one individual in particular keeps showing up for well over 10 years. This might initiate a more intensive study into that population, and perhaps they discover that the water these particular toads are drinking has special powers of longevity, the proverbial fountain of youth.
We just can’t predict how useful an observation is going to be. That is something the future will decide for us. Well, as mentioned at the start of my reply here, we can sort of predict one outcome, and that is “not useful if not made” :)
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… as a notorous moth collector, since childhood, I am used to write down what I see each time I see it at my light trap. When I started iNat, I tried a few single photos… then got into it more… and now I am slowly working up my childhood diaries from the 1970s. - Yes of course there is a lot of duplication. Common species I may have seen on various dates and locations through the years… but I am not doing this for a public audience (!), I am doing it for myself. iNat simply replaces my diaries and my 1970s moth collection. So, the carpet beetles may come and eat my collection… the paper of my diaries may get lost…I have an excellent backup, here at iNaturalist. I am very grateful for that… and I hope it doesn’t bother my fellow colleagues, if I upload, say 50 moths from last night, or a batch of 200 records from my collection. - Please keep this website as open as it is now, thank you!
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