Recruiting more identifiers

my experience with master naturalists, master gardeners, etc. is mixed. (no offense to any master naturalists, etc. out there.) if you’re going to develop a crossover program like that, i’d almost rather target boy and girl scouts – get an iNat badge after doing 100 research observations and 100 identifications for others, or something like that. maybe develop some eagle scout or gold award projects that incorporate iNaturalist (ex. organizing a bioblitz and using the data to do some sort of conservation / outreach / research). lots of kids have lots of free time during summers and breaks, and if you can get them interested in nature early in life, all the better. also, a boy or girl scout who already has an iNat badge in a class just about to do a bioblitz would probably be super helpful.

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I don’t use the app, but I’m looking at it on my iPhone now. I think there are people on iNat who almost always use the app for their own observations, and correctly ID some of their own observations, but don’t ever seem to ID for others. Maybe they just don’t know how to do it? Maybe they don’t know that there is a nice filterable Identify tool on the website? I don’t know the answers to my own questions here, but just wondering if that’s part of the reason some mid-level users don’t engage more.

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i bet a lot of it is just that people don’t know where to even begin. i think average people out there don’t know about plant keys and bugguide and that sort of thing. i’d love it if there was some sort of recommended resources list available that could be filtered by taxon and geography.

and then even if they do, i think there’s a problem of how to break things down into manageable chunks. i think for most people, it would make the most sense to break things down into smaller places (neighborhoods, parks, etc.) that they are familiar with, but most people probably don’t know how to even begin creating places in iNat. (i guess you could also break things down by going after specific taxa, but i think that makes for a different kind of experience.)

and then if you overcome that, there’s the whole thing about learning the mores and customs of the community. there’s lots of discussion on that. so i won’t rehash all that here, but one of the things i brought up in another thread is maybe having a little indicator on a persons first X number or first day’s worth of observations and/or identifications. that way, the community can be super welcoming (and very gentle in criticisms) when they see a person’s first identifications come through. there’s nothing better to promote future identifications than when other people express appreciation for a job well done. (i think that would be more effective than an identifier of the week thing, since i think the chances of any one person being selected for identifier of the week is probably relatively low.)

of course there are also ways to change up the system to make it easy to use, but i won’t get into too many ideas for that (yet), other than to say that i think the key again is to break things up into manageable chunks. for example, instead of showing an unlimited number of things to identify, maybe instead give people 5 or 10 to identify per day. (there’s more of a sense of accomplishment if you can finish off a defined set than if you do 10 and see that there are 1000 more to do.)

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  1. Most academics are very busy working on papers and other things that will help propel their careers. We do have some academics on here, but most do not have enough spare time to do this kind of thing. Or they think they don’t.
    Many older retirees are not very computer, cell-phone, or internet-savvy.

  2. Some mid-level users are reluctant to take time away from their own observations in order to ID other people’s obs. Or they don’t feel confident enough to do it.
    Some people care only about being on top of the relevant leaderboard.

  3. More recognition for hard-working ID-ers would be nice.

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Rather than recruit identifiers, I think a better solution would be to “convert” observers to identifiers. If people using the app are genuinely interested in nature, I think there has to be at least some interest in learning to identify organisms on your own, rather than rely solely on the app (and community) to tell you what they are. I think the app should help teach users how to identify a species, and in doing so they become more confident in IDing other people’s observations.

To enable this, I think it would be helpful if curators could add custom-written “Field Notes” on Taxon Pages, and have them show up when viewing taxa on the phone app (instead of the Wikipedia description, which does not always help a user know what to look for when identifying a species). It’s a similar function encouraged on the all but abandoned Guides on iNaturalist.

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I guess we could also use this new filter in the meantime to try to find responsive newcomers in this group: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/account-creation-filter-added-to-identify-page/1991

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Searching through several pages, i finally found out how many IDs i made for others … about 270. Îf that number were more visible, more people would want to increase theirs.

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You can find your ID count very easily under your profile; single click on your profile pic in the upper right corner of the page, and it’s the listed on the left under the profile tab along with no. of observations, no. of species, journal posts, etc.

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I think an underrated way of recruiting people to the site is actually just telling them how cool and useful it is and putting it in a context where it appears useful to their work. I’ve been telling my honours supervisor about iNat for months. Last week he got me to put up photos from one of the 3rd year courses he runs. I know this isn’t him engaging directly with the site, but it’s the first step to it (he now refers to iNat as ‘awesome’). In a few months I’m giving a seminar/workshop at UNSW about iNat and how to use it, so hopefully that will attract some IDers out of the professors that attend.

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Hi all,
I’m a mid-level user and try to do ID’s on an irregular basis. In fact, I had made a mental note to try to do more and then stumbled across another thread in this Forum where some folks were taking the position that it is unhelpful and even unwelcome to add in a simple ID such as “flowering plants” or “insects” when an observation is uploaded as “unknown.”

Frankly, I try to get as detailed an ID as I can, but will add the cursory category quite often since there are so many unknowns. I feel like any generalized ID helps those experts find the observations they can ID with certainty much faster.

Having said that, the thread suggesting that adding a general ID isn’t welcome really made me rethink helping in that way. Just saying…

And, I am not in favor “gamifying” the app or site in any way – doesn’t Seek do that already?

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Another mid-level user here :wave:

Going off what @jakubmamulski said, making it easier to ID observations from the mobile app would definitely help. While I try to ID on a semi-regular basis, I know I would ID a lot more often if I didn’t have to get on the computer every time. I know there’s the “explore” option in the app, but I don’t find that useful for adding identifications to observations. What I’d love to be able to do is hit an “identify” tab in the app that would take me to recent observations that need ID, with similar functionality to the website “Identify” experience (e.g. being able to search by place or taxon). If it were easier to identify observations through the app, I could see a lot of folks (including myself) IDing in short spurts while they wait for the bus, coffee, or whatever it might be. I don’t think gamification is as important as ease-of-use.

I also want to second @bobby23’s comment regarding “converting” observers. While recruiting outside experts will undoubtedly help, there are a limited number of them. I think cultivating a network of users with mid-level expertise (whether geographically or taxon-based) will likely go a lot farther, particularly if there were easy-to-use resources, whether in the form of mini-modules, “Field Notes”, or another format, on iNat to help.

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Do you remember the thread where people said it was unhelpful to ID unknown obs as simple stuff (could you link me)? I thought the opposite would be true; general IDs nonetheless narrow it down and allow people following certain taxa to see the obs.

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I think it’s useful, @scubabruin. And it’s not unwelcome. Keep it up!

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https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/why-do-some-serious-power-users-add-so-many-unknown-observations/282/34

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I’ll try to find it

Cheers paloma and scubabruin. From an extremely quick skim the only problem seems to be that you’re IDing things before the user can ID it themselves? Personally don’t think this is an issue at all (assuming you give a correct ID of course). The problem with not giving IDs for unknowns is Questagame. I don’t know what experiences others have had, but for Australian obs, quite a lot of Questagame obs are unknowns, so the issue of the uploader coming back later because of e.g. slow net isn’t the problem here

Yes, that’s the thread. If you go through the many comments, you’ll find a few comments about coarse ID’s not being welcome (not just for the power users), but in general. They talk about beginning users getting these coarse ID’s and how that could turn them off from continuing to use the site. I’m not loving the ideas espoused on that particular topic thread, but it’s an interesting question on how to get more ID’s and more identifiers on iNat.

Yeah I just read through the thread more and understand the viewpoint of disrupting someone’s workflow. Seems callous, but I think those people just have to deal with that disruption; personally I think giving coarse IDs has more benefits than downsides. This of course comes with a caveat relating to taxon level. I never make an ID as coarse as ‘bird’ or ‘arthropod’ (I only coarse ID to family or below as a general rule), but I can see how new users might just put ‘bird’ and it be an annoyance.

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If I had a dollar for every western sword fern I’ve identified …

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I suspect workflow differs greatly among identifiers. I usually start with a species with which I am familiar and work on attempting to confirm or disconfirm the species for a Needs ID. I often keep RG visible - I sometimes see a misidentified RG and will include a comment when I do offer an alternate identification. If I finish the species review, then I move up to the Genus level and look to see if any of that species is present at the Genus level. I then back on up to family or higher, adding in a place filter if there are too many to review at a higher level. I also sometimes scan the unknown at the Plantae level just to see what is out there at that level. Thus I start lower and move up. For my approach, having the user identify the plant to as specific a level as possible is beneficial. Leaving something that is obviously a plant at the completely unknown living organism level means I am not likely to see it: I have the plant filter on when looking at unknowns. But I may be alone in my approach.

I concur. No idea how to do this. And whatever system is used should reflect identifications which met with community agreement. Otherwise random identifications to run up an “identification score” is a risk. If pressed for ideas, perhaps little badges that display on the lower corner of profile picture. Or colored dots that change at specific thresholds (100 IDs, 1000 IDs, 10000 IDs,…)? Or a tagline that posts when one IDs along the lines of “identifier”, “regular identifier”, “top identifier” etc. for increasing numbers of identifications made.

I concur, but my guess is that the curators are already overloaded. Still, there should be some effort made to include identification information that helps key out similar species, certainly in the plants. Sure, some determinations may not be photographable, but where there are differences, these should be noted. In my own head I am thinking of how can one distinguish between Spathoglottis plicata and Spathoglottis unguiculata. The taxa pages do not appear to include the useful information that while S. plicata has a somewhat global distribution while S. unguiculata is considered to have a more limited range in a few islands of the southwest Pacific. This and other distinguishing morphological characteristics might help observers as they learn to identify and thus aid in recruiting more identifiers.

When I see that Canada has reached a million observations and that there are seven million needing identification, there is the suggestion that identifications are unable to keep pace with observations. One comment on another thread noted that Project Noah may have run into identifier issues, and they are only working with a total of 825K observations while iNaturalist is working with something on the order of over 18 million observations. Finding ways to recruit more identifiers seems to be potentially a critical need for the health of the iNaturalist ecosystem. The “You know you’re seriously into iNat when…” is now at 100 responses focused on observations and none on the joy of identification, a hundred-to-nothing does not seem to be a promising sign.

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