I came across someone who had uploaded pictures of animals from a class they were taking, so they are not inherently observations of the animals themselves. I marked them as not having “Evidence of organism” in the criteria below so at least they won’t be research grade. Is there another, perhaps more correct way, that those should be handled?
Were they photos of photos, taxidermy, or photos from a Zoom call?
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Could you explain it more, what’s on those photos? People? Then id them as human. Or stuffed animals? If latter, then cultivated or wrong date/place is better.
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I’m not sure I understand, do you mean that it was a picture of a picture, a picture of a collected specimen, or of a captive animal? If captive, I’d say “not wild” is more appropriate.
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Maybe you mean drawings of animals? I believe these observations should be allowed.
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I think everyone’s answers here pretty much sum up every single thing this situation could be. On the other hand, if you’re saying that these are image of images from books or something, then that would be copyright infringement.
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I don’t know if it’s appropriate to share the link here or not, but yes, it’s an image of an image (for all of the observations by this user).
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Photos of photos.
Pictures of printouts, almost like cheat sheets for what you may expect to see. Submitted dozens of times by many, many users.
Photos of which photos? If photo of another student, then it’s acceptable.
Not someone else’s photos. Printouts like this which is one of the few not yet flagged I can find
[removed by forum moderator]
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If they’re photos of photos of organisms that they did not take, I’d go ahead and flag as copyright infringement and say
"Hi, welcome to iNaturalist! Please only upload your own photos. iNaturalist observations should represent evidence of the actual organism you observed, not just a similar example. Uploading photos like this could have a negative impact on data quality, waste identifiers and curators time, and may have copyright implications. If you couldn’t get a photo of something you saw, it’s perfectly acceptable to upload observations of things you have observed without a photo attached.
Please see the help page for more info: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#observations8"
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Its kind of hard to make a recommendation for what to do without knowing what the pictures are of.
Personally I’d flag this as copyright infringement. The photo was clearly taken by someone else. I marked date/location as inaccurate for now so the example stays up.
I think they are trying to get IDs for an assignment/homework. Notice that the images have a blank for the scientific name on each print out.
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Not sure that those posts are the same ones that Macy was referring to.
Also, welcome to the forum!
These situations look like a class project gone wrong. The students, if all doing the same thing, are likely following instruction from an educator that has got it horribly wrong… I would reach out to a few of the students and ask them to pass on to their teacher(s) a copy of the URL to the iNat teacher’s guide, and maybe also have them ask the teacher to contact you through iNat DM, then if they do contact you, discuss with them about a better approach (and explain why current isn’t working), and also about how to go about correcting what has already transpired, if that is appropriate. These are chances to reach out and connect… If it’s a local school, for instance, there could be wonderful outcomes from engaging with them!
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Better to contact the teacher first, students are less likely to respond.
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I think it’s not known who the teacher is.
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yeah, my experience has been that the teacher is not always obvious, especially if the project is a collection rather than traditional, then it is especially difficult to figure out who the teacher is. Having established that it’s a class group by there being several “students” doing the same thing, then that is presumably the only contact point. If the teacher is obvious, then it’s obvious to bypass the student and go direct :)