I’m part of a group of local ambassadors who do lots of bioblitzes and events, both public and just the group of us. I like to provide info back to the people who attended, including a link to the observations that were made that day. I’ve sometimes done projects, but I usually set up a URL search instead, and send people the link. Even if it’s just two of us meeting to iNat together, I typically send the other person a link. I have a bookmarks folder set up with links to the url search for every event we’ve done, which is 31 so far this summer.
I do them as url searches instead of projects because:
I’m worried about cluttering up the projects list with so many projects.
It’s easier to find bookmarks, which I can organize however I want, than projects in my projects page.
When sharing info with people who are new to iNaturalist (or don’t even have accounts yet), projects seem like an extra layer of complication, when all they want is to see a list of observations.
The list of projects any particular observation is attached to is getting very long.
What does everyone else do? What do you think would be ‘best practice’?
EDIT:
Hmm … just when I thought I’d decided on the right way to go …
I’d like to be able to have a summary of how many different species we’ve found during our 31 (so far) events this year. That would be easy if each event had a project, as I could do an umbrella project. I’d just about decided that the benefits of individual projects might be worth it, so I decided to start doing some of our events as projects, only to realize that for each project you have to have a place. Our events rarely coincide with an existing ‘place’, so I’d have to add 31+ more places to iNat.
If you make a project for a place – a park, a river bank – then you can easily filter by date to send a link. And if you do return to the same place regularly you build up more depth and breadth of info that way. 31 events at how many places, or is that literally 31 different small places ?
I will join a project in the hopes of getting journal posts for progress updates. But a one off event ? Still maybe – we found this endangered sp, or the population returned after fire / flood. We hike this route a few times a year and last week we found https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/381776464 which had not been seen just there along the river before, and is a new sp for our Fynbos Ramblers. One project, many local routes, many years.
PS for my purposes it is an invite only traditional project. No fuss with getting the location inside the box.
I would make a project if either I was gonna use its journal posts as a central method of communication, or if I felt it was important for that collection of records to be publicly available / accessible in the future.
That’s assuming collection projects - traditional projects have their own uses.
I’ve experienced this as well. In my experience, they have trouble figuring out the query and filtration parameters after the bio-blitz in order to see what they just observed. If you’re bio-blitzing an area without a place, it’s even more difficult. And I understand wanting to allow the organization you’re serving the time to understand how to set up their own place (so they own it going forward).
For the people I’m creating a link for, many of them don’t even have an iNaturalist account. They would never be filtering observations - I just need a link to send them to say “Hey, look what we saw!”
it might depend on how they’re used to interacting with iNaturalist. if they’re app users, it might be easier to direct them to a project than to a link. i’m not sure the app(s) will handle all links appropriately, and it may be confusing navigating a web interface if they’re used to the app interface.
I hadn’t thought about this. A link sends people to the website, even if they’re opening it on a phone and have the app. Unfortunately, I don’t think there would be a way to have it automatically go to the app or the website, depending on whether it’s opened on a phone or if the app is installed.
You get a complete history, but can also see what was seen on individual outings. With a collection project, you can limit observations to projects members.
Per your EDIT - you wouldn’t necessarily need a place. When creating the collection project, filter on observers & date - that should do it if you know who the participants are.
Ok, make sure you have the project ready and have each participant join the project and you filter on members only. You don’t have to do anything else. Select date & members only.
Places are unevenly created and are a problem for iNaturalist - uses alot of computer resources. Additionally, small places are useless, due to GPS inaccuracies. Unless you visit the same place frequently, i wouldn’t bother.
I had put up a feature request, some time ago, that was rejected immediately, to allow users to use the custom circle/rectangles as “places” in collection projects. They claimed they were working on it already. We’ll see.