Using a list created by the City showing identifications and locations of trees made by a professional arborist, I added each observation to iNaturalist and gave the species-level identification provided by the professional arborist. I put in the note for each of my observations so made that the ID was made by a professional arborist with the City.
A community member is now saying the arborist-provided identification is incorrect via comments to my observation saying that I did not provide enough documentation for it. I have replied each time saying that the observation was made by a professional arborist on-site. Since one community member is disagreeing with the professional observation, it is fine with me if it remains casual, but it seems to me that a professional arborist making the ID should be enough for community members to agree.
It seems to me that this is a flaw with iNaturalist, so I am raising it here.
As a profession botanist that has had to work with data collected by other professional botanists and professional arborists, I can verify that both professional botanists and professional arborists make identification mistakes, hopefully not often, but some very often. Sometimes this is due to the lack of good keys but overconfidence is the biggest mistake. On iNat, you should provide enough data to prove if it is correct or not.
Observations on iNaturalist should provide enough evidence for users on the site to independently verify the identification. This is what the community ID is intended for and why multiple agreeing identifications are needed to reach Research Grade. With this system, ID errors can be corrected, even IDs made by those who are very familiar with the taxa they study.
An observation can still be eligible for Research Grade even if it cannot be determined to species level by the evidence provided, so long as it is a naturally occurring organism.
As I understand, on iNat, people are supposed to eschew making agreements based on confidence in the abilities of someone else to identify the taxon. That is, a professional arborist’s determination is by definition not enough for community members to agree.
A potential identifier may
not be able to confirm the arborist’s identification, but have no reason to dispute it, in which case the appropriate action is for him to do nothing.
believe that the arborist’s identification is incorrect, in which case the appropriate action is to enter what he believes is the correct identification (if he has one), or enter an identification at a higher rank (if he doesn’t).
believe that the arborist’s identification may be correct, but that the evidence provided is insufficient to prove it. This is the difficult one. He can ask for additional evidence (e.g. including as notes features observed in the field but not shown by the photographs, or providing additional photographs). Or he can enter an identification at a higher rank. There are two issues with the latter: there may be ways to discriminate between taxa that he is unaware of, and adding the higher rank ID has, as far as I understand, little effect, so it’s more clutter than light. These are the reasons I am reluctant to reluctant to add higher rank IDs, even for taxa where I have claims to expertise.
Your characterisation of the nature of the dispute was unclear. If the community member says that the identification is incorrect, that implies that he has positive evidentiary reasons to reject it, that is in contradiction with a statement that insufficient evidence was provided. I suspect a misunderstanding somewhere along the line. Looking at the observation indicates what was meant was that it was inappropriate to enter an ID beyond what is supported by the provided evidence.
In the particular observation at issue, this is a genus where even botanists who study the genus disagree on the number of species that exist. (“The taxonomic classification of shadbushes has long perplexed botanists, horticulturalists, and others, as suggested by the range in number of species recognized in the genus, from 6 to 33, in two recent publications. A major source of complexity comes from the occurrence of hybridization, polyploidy, and apomixis (asexual seed production), making species difficult to characterize and identify.” - Wikipedia).
I don’t think this is true. If someone uploads a photo of a blurry black smudge identified as a Fish Crow it would be fine for an identifier to explicitly disagree with that ID, even if it is totally possible that that blurry smudge is in fact a Fish Crow. Explicitly disagreeing with X means you think the evidence provided does not conclusively demonstrate the species is X, not that it is impossible for the observation to be of X.
I have come across plenty of labelled trees - presumably identified by arborists - where the label was wrong. Sometimes subtly wrong, sometimes blatantly wrong. At one point one of the local councils managed to plant Prunus serotina (an American species) for Prunus padus (a European species) in a nature reserve. Misidenitifcations aren’t uncommon!
The ID may be right, it may be wrong, but it’s often worth going back for more pictures if you can. Worst case you’re proved right, best case it’s not what you thought and you’ve discovered something new.
just to clarify, the reason the observation in question is casual grade is because the observation has been marked as not wild by the system and a community member.
the identifer offered an identification at complex but did not explicitly disagree with your species level identification. so your observation remains at species and – barring the not wild classification – would have also remained in needs ID. (in other words, other folks’ identifications are not the reason your observation is casual grade.)
it looks like you subsequently went and marked can be improved = yes. this is the wrong course of action. if you wanted to try to remove the casual label and could legitimately say that the tree is in fact wild, you should mark the tree as wild and also ask for other folks to remove their wild = no votes. if the tree is in fact not wild, then the observation is correctly classified as casual according to the rules of the system.
although it is not the case here, if you did have a case where a community identification changed the observation taxon to something other than the taxon from your own identification, you could set the observation taxon back to your ID by opting out of community ID, though this has some potential downsides and should usually be reserved for only special situations.
My colleagues have a saying, “There are people who can grow plants well and there are people who can identify plants accurately, and they are rarely the same people.”
I use this mostly to explain why I can’t help you grow healthy rhododendrons although I am a botanist and a pretty good one in some ways. This is part of our scientific approach of scepticism toward anyone’s identifications, including our own. Appropriate scepticism, too, I must say after my more than 10,000 withdrawn identifications – although I actually am a well-credentialed expert in (some) plant identification, whose ID’s should be taken seriously though NOT uncritically.