I don’t pay in money - but I appreciate that iNat is not behind a paywall, and does not blast us with ads. Any ads.
I do give my time. Many hours every day as a second-tier identifier, helping to direct obs to the right taxon filters for the specialists.
If you upload with your own ID, a ratio of 1.25 covers the (free to you) IDs you expect.
.25 to cover discussion on the difficult ones.
2.25 if you would upload without any ID.
You have 3K obs … you ‘owe’ some more IDs to others before you can count yourself as a net contributor. One ID for others for each of your obs is a good first target.
Well, we don’t have to identify, any more than we have to contribute money. But identifications are very useful and, to be honest, identifying is more fun than donating money.
You’re right, that’s really obnoxious, and it absolutely does ruin things for the ones that just don’t do that stuff. The thing about best practices is that most people don’t actually use them. What you are describing is not a best practice, it’s one of the things that the best practices are meant to discourage. (The other thing is the flip side, i.e. never talking to your donors ever again.)
The actual best practice is to value your donors and maintain a positive relationship with them, which includes giving them opportunities to donate again. Selling donor contact information is the opposite of valuing donors. It breaks trust, and then you probably feel like you need to keep using those obnoxious tactics in order to break even.
So far, from what I’ve seen, iNaturalist has avoided falling into the ditch on either side. They’re not using obnoxious high-pressure tactics, and they’re not never asking for donations, either.
The screenshot I shared is actually from the bottom of a recent email to donors.
The email itself was actually a really gracious thank you note.
I just went back and reread and that is all it is. It does not contain phrases like “additional needs”, “additional funding” or contain any ask language.
It just says thank you.
I value iNaturalist for many reasons but their extremely thoughtful treatment of donors is definitely high on the list.
There is no obligation to ID, if you only observe and don’t ID that is perfectly legitimate, pressuring people to ID in a given amount relative to their observations only discourages observations and pressure to ID may lead to rushed erroneous IDs
As someone who does a lot of IDs I never am bothered by observations, observations are a contribution as well, because they are putting the specimen up for an IDer like me to come across and ID
if someone uploads a random ant they found, and then I come across it and it turns out to be something rare, that record of a rare species is valuable, and would not exist with out that observation. As an identifier I see observers as a resource not a burden
That said, if you want to generate identifiable obs of insects, it is a good idea to get one of those clip on macro lenses for your phone, this will increase the likelihood that your observations can be identified. I’m not saying don’t get better equipment if you can afford it and know how to use it, but the iPhone lens is probably the cheapest and easiest to use way to improve insect photography. I would say that in order of quality you go from iPhone alone (images like this https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/178800592) to iPhone with macro lens (never used, 10s of $) to a point and shoot camera with a good macro mode (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/60856962, $200-600) to a DSLR or mirrorless camera with a 2:1 macro lens (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/184182075 $800+)
I donate monthly. Not a huge amount but an amount I can afford . I figure I’m paying for storing my records and helping to maintain the site’s infrastructure. No one is getting rich off of iNat.
I donate monthly, too. I figure I get so much enjoyment out of iNat (as well as contributing to science) that I really should be paying something to keep it going. I wouldn’t expect to enjoy watching a streamed movie without paying for it, nor borrow books from my local library without paying taxes to support it, nor go to a museum, a concert, a play without paying for it. I also realize that not everyone can afford to pay for things like iNat or movies or books or museums, but I can (privilege is useful sometimes), so I donate somewhat more so other people can have some enjoyment and education, too.
And since I donate monthly on an automatic basis, I feel completely guilt-less when I ignore any requests for donations.
Also, in the past I’d be spending that money on field guides which I no longer have shelf space for. INat is now one of my main field guides and it doesn’t take up physical space in my house.
Ha! I have felt the need to buy more field guides since joining iNaturalist - bryophytes, lichens, fungi, spiders, insects of all sorts. I even bought a little shelf to put next to my desk, so I have the books close at hand when I’m identifying.
But we do need both. Taxon specialists need observers, and observers want to know What is this? Ideally Needs ID goes down a bit, instead of soaring up out of reach.
iNat could not function without both, yes, I was just saying that both are contributions, so someone making observations and no IDs is still making useful contributions to the site (but they should identify their own observations to the lowest taxon they are sure of)
I’m just as glad that scientists aren’t the ones paying for it. If they were, they would get to set quality standards for the data that we upload. Imagine the sponsors of iNaturalist deleting any of your observations that they do not consider to be high enough quality data.
I think some people are more adept or comfortable with making IDs while others may be more comfortable with making observations. I don’t see the need to essentially force people to do something that they are not comfortable with. Just my 2 cents.
Thanks for all the thoughtful replies. I was essentially reacting to a fundraising request that stated that so far they have not had to impose a fee on users. I guess that is always possible, and would be no different than the majority of apps generally. I am also sure they are pursuing as many other funding sources as they reasonably can, such as grants, etc.
Btw, I did make a contribution before I read any of these replies. I received a second solicitation that was worded much better in my opinion.
Here is a statement from a seminar hosted by the Cary Institute. It shows how valuable the data is, including potential information about secondary things in the image frame.
“ Natural world images collected by communities of enthusiast volunteers provide a vast and largely uncurated data source. For instance, iNaturalist has over 200 million images tagged with species labels, already contributing immensely to research such as biodiversity monitoring and having been cited in over 4,000 scientific papers. Yet, these images are also known to contain a wealth of “secondary data” captured unintentionally or otherwise included in images and not properly reflected in image labels. Although this data contains crucial insights into interactions, animal social behavior, morphology, habitat, co-occurrence, and many more questions, the costly, time-consuming, or expert-dependent analysis needed to extract such information prevents breakthroughs.
Advances in deep learning methods for language and computer vision have the potential to enable the efficient and automated processing techniques needed to unlock the “hidden treasure” in such datasets. The ability to directly search large image collections for these concepts would enable richer analyses, beyond species identification. We propose interactive, open-ended image retrieval as a mechanism to support scientific discovery in these collections and introduce INQUIRE, a novel text-to-image retrieval benchmark built to provide a rigorous evaluation that challenges models to demonstrate advanced knowledge and visual reasoning on expert, scientifically impactful retrieval tasks.”
I consider iNat to be a conservation organization so they get my conservation giving dollars.
Nonprofits often rely on a tripod of funding streams: donations, grants, and fee-for-service. I don’t think iNat has a fee-for-service stream, or if they do it is very niche. One fee-for-service I could see eventually is a paid and free version of the apps.
Asking scientists to pay for access to the data could open a can of worms in that people might be less willing to use a generous copyright, insisting on a cut of the proceeds, especially for observations of rare organisms. That in turn adds a whole layer of commodification and transactionality to the data that currently does not exist. And this could incentivize unscrupulous observing behavior. Personally, I hope the data remains open and free.
I work in a nonprofit and recently moved into a position (hopefully temporarily) where I am working more on the fundraising side of things. We don’t sell our contact lists though we work them internally for fundraising and marketing. It’s the way of the nonprofit world.
all those species labels come from volunteers. Free both to the observer and to scientists who use the data.
Some of those scientists are active on iNat - curating their slice - for free.
We each choose whether we are
Without IDs your obs has no ‘practical’ value. And iNat has to pay for the background upkeep for both the known and UNknown.
Who is forcing anyone to make IDs? The most I see is people saying that it’s good etiquette to give at least as much as you expect to get. Personally, I would say that it’s also a kind thing to do. But it’s certainly not required!
Many people are not comfortable making IDs largely because they haven’t done it. Anyone with enough skills to make observations has enough skills to make IDs, they just may feel intimidated because they don’t realize that what they know is helpful. Better onboarding may help with this.
For example, if you can tell a bird from a plant, you can go through “unknown” observations and label birds with “birds”, and you’ll never run out of occasions to do that, because more are coming in all the time. And a lot of those “birds” observations will make it to species, because there’s a ton of people who can take it from there.
I agree with this.
At the end of the day, I make observations because I think it’s fun. I identify observations of others because I enjoy doing it.
I think the fewest people on iNat view what they are doing as some noble self-sacrifice.
iNat is a great place for sharing all the cool things I found (my family have long lost patience with me wanting to show them all my insect/plant/lichen photos). So I am incredibly grateful that I can use iNat for free.