Quick question:
What constitutes “recent evidence of organism”? On the explanation page it states over 100 years old but I’ve always assumed that is a guideline and is mainly there to prevent fossils from being RG. Many of my dead coral observations have only been dead for 200-500 years, apparently too dead to be RG but nowhere near old enough to be a fossil.
Is the 100 year limit a “soft limit” with recent evidence if organism being solely for fossils, or is it a hard 100 year limit?
1 Like
It’s there partially to deal with fossils but also becuase iNat’s really about mapping extant species. If somehting is like 101 years old that’s probably fine, but 200-500 is too old to be RG.
4 Likes
Is our institution uploading data to Symbiota? Many herbaria do. Maybe other collections, too (I wouldn’t know). Symbiota is not as user-friendly as iNaturalist for getting the data (as far as I can tell), but the data is available there.
1 Like
I totally agree that these are very valuable data and that it is great to have them accessible to researchers (or anyone who wants to use them). There are lots of ways for institutions (herbaria, museums, other NHCs) to get their data available online, including through GBIF, that are more suited to NHC data than iNat. And iNat has been clear that they don’t want iNat to be used as a type of collections management software.
4 Likes
This obs. got me wondering about archival records (I know a lot of folks upload very old slides or historic museum specimens) and what happens once iNat has been around for 100 years: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/138850606. I hunted around for a minute on the Feature Requests page for something related, but couldn’t find anything. I’m wondering if at some point a toggle showing “recent” records vs. all records might not be useful/necessary.
1 Like
but we can sort by Date Observed
Presumably, the guidelines will have been refined by that time; “within 100 years prior to iNat’s inception,” or something like that.