I am aware of some of the guidelines surrounding posting preserved specimens, notably that it’s perfectly accepted to upload your own specimens as that is fully your own interaction with the individual, while posting material from institutional collections is discouraged as they should be publishing data through other avenues than iNaturalist.
I’ve run into what I find to be a bit of a grey area, however: I’ve acquired plenty of unmounted specimens from other amateur entomologists, which have their collection labels (locality+date). I did not collect these, some of them go back from before I was even born, but I do mount them into proper specimens myself and as far as I know the data labels are accurate. Is iNat the correct avenue to publish this data? I thought about looking into publishing directly to GBIF, but I am not affiliated full-time to any institution other than my university. I would really like to make the data publicly available as a lot of private collectors don’t, and some of the species have very few occurrences on aggregators.
Part of me still can’t help but feel like it’s “cheating” to have observations of low-observation species across the world on my account when I wasn’t the one to go there and collect the specimen though, haha.
That’s the perfect way to do it. In fact, I almost always do it that way. Once they have been identified, the specimens will be sent to a university museum. If someone is jealous that you are the best observer of, say, heteroptera species in your country, that can easily be solved by blocking you as a member of that list.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but this situation is discouraged but not prohibited by iNaturalist staff. I would personally only consider posting such specimens if it’s a species that has no online photos and if it’s a species whose ID I can independently confirm. I think there is benefit to creating an observation on iNaturalist to use as a taxon photo for species that have no observations.
What volume of specimens are you talking about? A few dozen? A few hundred?
I think the consensus of previous discussions (e.g. here) has been that the occasional observation of specimens not collected by yourself is tolerated, but if you have large numbers it would be better to find another way to get the digitalized records online.
I don’t understand what the problem is with doing that. Some of the collected specimens added to iNaturalist were identified only as taxon sp. at first, and later they became new species in iNaturalist — others did not. Some taxa would not even exist on iNaturalist if they hadn’t been collected and photographed with microscopic details. Are we really going to discourage members from doing this? The only reason I can think of for opposing it is the desire for someone else to stop being the top observer.
The issue, as bouteloua stated, is that if the specimen is not collected by the user then it is not their own interaction with it in nature and iNaturalist is meant to record people’s personal interactions with biodiversity somewhat like a nature journal. I regularly upload specimens with microscopy that I collected myself.
I definitely have over a hundred of these. If I remember correctly, I believe taxon photos can be sourced from outside iNaturalist so even if I upload them elsewhere the photos could still be used as long as wherever it’s uploaded shows the licensing.
I have seen in other similar discussions that people suggested making a separate account, and that certainly seems better than uploading to my usual one, but I understand this still deviates from iNat’s intended use. At the moment I’m just not sure where else to host the records as an individual. I’ve thought about doing it on a website of my own, but it is going to be lower visibility for people looking for occurrence data for the species or institutions who would be interested in the specimen.
You could also look into a micropublication that will upload the data to GBIF - you may want to check out Specimen Micropublications. There are other options out there, but we recently had a graduate student publish a species list here and had good experience.
I don’t see why it can’t be both at the same time. Is it really better for the platform to ask users to remove the dozen species for which there is the only known photo in the world — and which I believe is exactly why many people visit the site — just because they didn’t find them personally, while keeping the photo of a common insect (for example, Musca domestica) that I see every day? Personally, I would ask for the opposite: to remove the hundreds of blurry photos of the same species.
That said, if I were to create a platform intended to serve as a repository for specimens collected by others, I would probably use the same infrastructure as this site.
We could ask the community: “Would you like iNaturalist to be a site that, in addition to sharing personal experiences with nature, also serves as a repository for digital photographs of collected specimens? Or would you prefer it to be used solely for sharing your own photographs?”
Moreover, this would benefit both types of users. One day, someone might upload a photo of a now-extinct beetle collected from New Guinea and, years later, the Computer Vision system would recognize that specimen as being photographed by a hiker, something that would not happen if both photos were on different platforms.
Well, the computer vision needs at least several dozen observations for training, and specimen photos do not, as a rule, look much like field photos, so I doubt that this scenario would prove to have any direct benefits – a handful of specimen photos would not be enough for a species to be included in the model and it would likely not recognize the species in the photograph by the hiker if it has only been trained on specimen photos. So likely rare species would have to be recognized by human identifiers in any case.
I mean, I do see the value in collecting all the relevant information and data in one place, but iNaturalist also has to balance this with practical issues: how much it can afford to host (both financially and in terms of its digital infrastructure); how to manage growth; how to meet the diverging needs of different user groups that would emerge if they were to actively support scientific collections as well as activities of mostly lay individuals. Given the enormous growth that iNat is experiencing and the fact that its resources are already stretched thin, it seems reasonable to me to draw the line somewhere and suggest that digitized scientific collections should be hosted elsewhere.
Note that nobody is saying that it is forbidden to upload observations of specimens you were not involved in collecting. But if it is on the scale of a major collection rather than occasional individual specimens, it is worth thinking about whether iNat is the right place to host this – not just in light of the user guidelines, but for other reasons as well, such as the fact that it doesn’t support many of the sorts of data management tools and features that are expected and/or required for research material (to name just a few: custom metadata options; version history; a plan for long-term archiving, etc.)
This has been discussed from many different angles in many different threads. It’s a classic case of having a hammer, so every problem looks like a nail. Rather than trying to add many more use cases to the hammer, better to use the most suitable tool for the given use case. iNaturalist was not meant to be an all-purpose tool for everything nature-related.
I’m not sure it is quite “trying to make iNat be everything to all people.” I believe Rafael is coming from a position as an identifier of difficult taxa where reliably ID’d reference images can be difficult to find – I do see that while identifying observations on iNat it would be very useful to be able to refer to iNat observations of specimens (which may additionally include useful ID discussions) rather than having to search half a dozen external sources, potentially in multiple languages, in an effort to maybe find an image set that helps one understand the species one is investigating.
In Europe there have been a variety of initiatives to create online resources that would collect species reference material, but these are fragmented and scattered and there is no single initiative that has gotten enough momentum to be a central repository of such material that crosses national and linguistic borders. To some extent iNat has de facto become that, since there are a number of users who have been making an effort to upload observations with detailed images of specimens they have collected. In that context, I do see how it might feel a bit absurd to feel that one is being banned from posting specimens provided by a friend merely because one did not personally collect them. (In the case of recently collected specimens rather than inherited ones, I suppose one solution would be to convince the friend to create an iNat account and post the specimens themselves.)
As I said above, I do agree with the general principle that iNat is not the best place for systematically uploading large scientific collections that do not represent one’s personal encounters with nature – because it would not ultimately be in the interest of either iNat or the owner of the collection to do so.
But I also understand the dilemma – if one wants to get the useful material online and make it searchable and accessible to as many people as possible and aggregate it with other similar materials, it is difficult at present to know what platform one should use, because there aren’t any obvious alternatives that would be comparable to iNat.
This is pretty much exactly my dilemma. I find that I’m sort of in an in-between here- it’s not just 10-20 specimens, but it’s not 500+ on the scale of a small museum either (though with the years, if I inherit more it could eventually be..).
As an amateur and not a professional taxonomist (who would likely have more relevant contacts), I am also limited with access to resources for identification. Some species description I cannot access because they haven’t been digitized and no libraries (even in insect collections) near me have a copy, the only option left being used copies selling for hundreds. That means a publication is not really feasible for specimens I can’t identify and for which I am not in contact with a collection that would accept them as donations. (the journal Collection does seem really interesting though!) Collections I’ve donated to in the past are curationally limited as is the case with many around the world currently (space, staff) and focus on local specimens while these are international.
The global expertise iNatualist brings with users potentially having access to the information I don’t and allowing curators from institutional collections who would find a specimen a relevant addition and can accept them (and in the meantime, having the time to dedicate to them, I make sure the specimens aren’t left to get eaten by pests or rot away) to reach out is what’s hard to find anywhere else, currently.
But it also definitely feels like there is a use-case for an entire separate platform here. I know several other local entomologists both amateur and professional with personal collections that include specimens for which they have no contact with the original collector, or the original collector has passed. It’s just that like spiphany said, the attempts at such platforms are fragmented and obscure so people continue to flock to iNat and use it in ways that aren’t really intended because it’s the most convenient and has the biggest userbase. I’ve certainly thought about setting up a personal TaxonWorks instance with a frontend for my collection, but it’s not an ideal solution for long-term archival and global visibility.