A marine species is sighted on two reefs separated by some distance, within the same week. What is the minimum distance that separates these two sightings before they can be recorded as distinct observations on iNat?
Hundreds of meters
About 1 km
At least a few km
Hundreds of kilometers
Is there some “Seen Nearby” criterion for undersea observations that differs from terrestrial observation? Is the “Seen Nearby” tag useful in this case and can it be customized to a specific distance?
I’ve recorded (photographed) an underwater species in over a dozen different locations within a radius of 5km. Must I record each observation separately, or is there a better way of doing this?
What is the minimum distance that separates these two sightings before they can be recorded as distinct observations on iNat?
If they don’t fit in the field of view of your camera in a single image at the same time, they are separate observations
I personally would only post those that you feel are in a meaningfully different location or time, but if you want to post them all they need to be separate unless they are in the same picture.
Perhaps I have misunderstood, but I believe that an observation is meant to represent one observer’s experience of one organism at one moment of time (though depending on habit, the observer could spend a duration of time observing that organism and the observation would reflect that).
(A week seems long to me, even for the same organism.)
This is correct. And therefore it doesn’t violate any rule to post two observations of the same individual in the same place a few moments apart. Would I spend my time doing so? No. But it is at the discretion of the observer.
I guess I was looking for something more substantial than “if you feel like it”.
Perhaps the better question is, am I providing useful information? At what distance between observations would a biologist find this information useful?
I’m not very interested in “make work”, redundant observations, or padding my observation numbers.
It depends on what the biologist is studying. For some research questions it may be useful to have a lot of observations clustered close together. For other research questions this may be redundant data.
with complete sincerity, the most important thing is to have fun. you are connecting with nature and then donating your time, effort, and photos with scientists for free and demanding nothing in return.
as long as you follow the official rules, do anything you like.
Pragmatism often determines uncontrolled sampling contexts. In our open access paper written to aid citizen scientists trying to estimate species richness, the main test case was a dataset of fishes observed whilst SCUBA diving in a coral reef marine park. The focus was incidence data. We pragmatically chose to make our sampling unit a single day.
Extending this in your case, I suggest that if you can be sure that you are seeing different individuals during a single day, make separate observations. If you are not sure, then wait a day and don’t worry that you might re-record the same individual.
This is a good question, but it is very hard to give a definite answer. Different questions required different types of data. For just presence data, some commonly used resolutions are 30 m, 100 m, 500 m, 1000 m (1 km).
But scientists also use iNat data to assess behaviors, phenology, and other kinds of things, so there’s no hard and fast rules about predicting what could be useful. That’s why some folks have answered that you should do what you enjoy - if you stick around and keep adding observations because you enjoy it, there’s probably more chance of making a contribution in the long run.
In my personal experience, I would generally say that I tend to observe one of each species at whatever I am considering a “site” in my mind at each trip there, and more if something different presents itself (different life stage, behavior, etc.). But this is largely because I just want to remember what I saw on any given day, not because I’m trying to anticipate what might help scientists.
There are some previous threads that address similar questions that might be helpful to look over as well, e.g.:
You’ve already got some good responses. I would add that scientists using iNaturalist data generally know the observations are collected according to the interests and whims of a huge group of different people. We plan accordingly! If we need data that follows a detailed protocol, we will collect it ourselves, or spend a lot of time curating public data to make sure it is suitable for our work.
It’s great that you want to provide quality data to scientists. But the flipside of the first paragraph is that scientists are a large and varied group too, and what is useful for one of us isn’t necessarily useful for the other.
The upshot being, collect data that interests you, and thank you for sharing it with us. And if you’re in doubt, more observations are generally more likely to provide value for more people. We can filter out what would be redundant for a study, but we can’t add data that wasn’t recorded.
So, there isn’t data supporting the idea that reefs separated by some distance ‘x’ function like lakes or mountain ranges separated by some analogous distance. (I’m not a marine or population biologist).
I asked this question because making underwater observations is a little more involved than simply whipping out a mobile phone and snapping a pic in the iNat app. In my case, I have to take a screen grab off a video clip, and post-process the image before uploading. It can get a little tedious, hence the need to justify the effort.
But iNat was founded as a platform from which to do some science, and is largely steered by some heavy-weight scientific institutions. If I were a scientist, though, I’d like to be able to squeeze as much relevant data as possible from this site.
it’s my understanding that iNat’s primary goal is to provide a tool & community to support individuals exploring nature for their personal enjoyment. In the process, it has generated a lot of data that has great scientific value, but that’s not the main goal.
Most of the time the motivations to generate useful data and to support users are compatible. But in instances where there is a conflict, fostering the user community takes precedence over scientific rigour. For example, users are free to withdraw their data at any time. That’s a serious shortcoming for a scientific archive, but an understandable feature to allow users to control their own work, and protect their privacy.
I think this is a common misunderstanding, and the source of many debates in the forum.
My understanding is that it’s very difficult to predict in advance what sort of data will be useful in the future. That is both the strength and the weakness of the wide variety of practices iNaturalist observers follow. We can have reasonable confidence that a higher quality observations (clearer photos/audio, more precise location accuracy, more information about behaviors or associated organisms) will be more useful than low-quality observations (eg a single blurry cell phone photo with a location accuracy of 100km). Beyond that, it really is about what will keep you interested and engaged and therefore making observations. The primary person you need to justify the effort to is yourself. There are so many other good and worthwhile things you could choose to do with your life instead. What makes it worthwhile for you to make observations on iNaturalist? Lean into that.
I personally make observations of nearly all the individual birds, insects, and arachnids I can photograph while I’m out, plus a decent number of plants and whatever other interesting things I see. I find it satisfying to pay attention to behavior and presence at that level of granularity, and it’s also important to me to formally observe the common organisms that often go overlooked. Sometimes that means I have 10 observations of robins in a single park in a single day.
The tradeoff is that for every hour in the field I spend several hours sorting, editing, and uploading photos - and so it’s difficult for me to upload in a timely fashion. If some scientist is looking for info about the last 2 weeks, they usually won’t get anything from me. On the other hand, taking that time means I observe a lot of less-frequently-observed organisms.
I can’t know which approach will be more valuable to “scientists” in the long term, both because scientists aren’t a monolith and because the future is unpredictable. But I can make intentional choices that bring me joy and satisfaction, ensuring I follow the official rules of the site, and within that do the best quality work I can. That way I can be proud of whatever I produce, whether or not I ever see it being useful to anyone else.
Since I’m not making observations within the same reef on different days, I’m not concerned with making duplicate observations of the same individuals. Nevertheless, it sounds like I can treat individual reefs like distinct areas and record observations accordingly, especially if observing unique species.