This one is odd to me. I don’t think “iNaturalist Seek” is ever a term we’ve used (Seek’s offical name is “Seek by iNaturalist”), and their descriptions of it sound more like the iNaturalist app, not Seek by iNaturalist.
iNaturalist Seek allowed the location of each image to be entered as metadata to assist with automatic identification and this was done either using geolocation data in the image or entered manually at county level.
One application, iNaturalist Seek, provided a binary classification on whether the user should have confidence in the identification (identification confirmed) or not (multiple potential identifications suggested in order of likelihood).
Here’s one from Singapore on Tropical Swallowtail moths Lyssa zampa.
We concluded that:
City lights act as population sinks for Tropical Swallowtail moths Lyssa zampa during their mass emergence which is likely to get worse by climate change. Unfortunately, this phenomenon also disfavors fitter individuals.
We found moth’s mass emergence occurs when February is extremely dry. Climate change will likely increase drier spells.
Moths drawn to city lights tend to be better flyers with longer wings and lighter so city lights are unintentionally drawing out fitter individuals.
The Gaier and Resasco 2023 paper added above interestingly shows that iNat observations for a rare plant were more accurate than herbarium records and easier to identify issues with/correct…nice.
New one here! Black, E.N., Blair, J.D., Burg, K.R.L. van der, Marshall, K.E. Crowd-sourced observations of a polyphagous moth reveal evidence of allochronic speciation varying along a latitudinal gradient. PLOS ONE. 2023 Jul 13;18(7):e0288415. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288415
Added! Thank you, and congratulations on the paper. Note that you can also do this yourself with a wiki post. Just go to the main (first) post, scroll to the bottom of that post, and click on the Edit button.
Unfortunately it’s not open access but the primary author posted a Twitter thread with some takeaways, and you can contact iNat staff member @carrieseltzer (a coauthor) for the PDF.
The first municipal fauna inventory (published and made official) in Brazil, with 50 taxa mentioned, the result of the work of 113 specialists from 71 institutions in Brazil and abroad. Research conducted using information from the literature, museum specimens, authors’ personal observations, and data from various citizen science platforms, including iNaturalist.
Straube, F. C. (ed.). 2023. Inventário da Fauna de Curitiba. Curitiba, Brazil, Prefeitura Municipal de Curitiba. 270 pp. Drawings by Birgitte Tümmler.
Very prominent place for iNaturalist here:
Skvarla, M.J., Fisher, J.R., 2023. Online community photo-sharing in entomology: a large-scale review with suggestions on best practices. Annals of the Entomological Society of America 20, 1–29.
Available at https://doi.org/10.1093/aesa/saad021 .
That’s a great article and a clear, balanced discussion of what sort of information sites like iNat can provide and what their limitations are/things that need to be considered with using such data sets.
