Require observers to manually select an answer to "Organism is wild?" during large events

[paul_dennehy]

Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: Mobile

URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant:

Description of need:
This is not a CNC-specific request, but rather a feature request that could be helpful in many situations when events lead to large influxes of incorrectly marked Cultivated organisms. Currently, when uploading any organism on either of the apps, the answer to Cultivated/Wild defaults to “Wild”. New observers during events like CNC are often accused of incorrectly marking their cultivated observations as wild, but they’re not actively making this decision- the system is making it automatically, and the users are mostly completely unaware that it’s happening.

Feature request details:
During Great Backyard Bird Count, eBird alters its filters for what observations require review, just for a few days, to have a better chance at catching the influx of misidentifications that happen during the event. I propose that iNat develop a similar strategy for catching influxes of incorrectly marked cultivated plants during events. When it is deemed appropriate, staff should have the option to temporarily force all observations to require the manual tapping of a checkbox to select “wild” or “not wild”. This will not deter “bad actors” from deliberately faking data, but it will at least make users think about the Wild/Cultivated question, and putting even a few seconds of thought into the question should be enough to improve a great deal of the data.

Specifically, no observation can be submitted without this question being answered, so if someone makes neither selection, an error message should pop up saying “select if this organism was wild or not” or something like that. Because the problem is specifically with cultivated plants, perhaps this feature could only require the manual “wild” selection for all organisms posted with a plant ID or no ID, defaulting back to “Wild” if an ID of a Fungus, Animal, etc. is selected, as these are not usually as much of an issue. Perhaps the error message could even change based on the currently selected ID (i.e. if a plant ID has been suggested, the message asks “does this plant seem to have been planted here by a human?” to make it very clear what the user is being asked)

I’m not requesting that this change be permanent, as it would get tiresome to have to make these manual selections year-round, but I think the benefit of catching tens of thousands of automated incorrect datapoints is worth the cost of an extra tap when I’m observing a plant for a few days out of the year.

In conclusion, there seems to be abundant frustration and even anger here on the forum about these thousands of users “marking their captive observations as wild”, but I think this is largely a problem with the system, not with them. I suggest that this feature would catch a lot of the errors with minimal interruption to anyone’s workflow.

[DianaStuder]

Plenty of captive animals too. Farm - zoo - pet - aquarium.

[comradejon]

This strikes me as very practical, minimally invasive, and likely to have a meaningful impact.

One of the best specific, concrete ideas I’ve seen coming out of some of the City Nature Challenge discussions (not that there aren’t other good ideas, too)!

I hope this one gains some traction.

Edit: Might be worth doing for every user’s first 50 (or so) observations, too, regardless of the time of year, if that’s relatively easy to implement.

[Naelin]

Applying this to every user’s first 50 observations (and then doing some sort of notification once the 50 are reached, like "your observations will now default to wild unless you specify otherwise, please remember to mark any captive/cultivated organisms as such) would probably be a much easier way to do this and cover both fronts, since most of the issues with CNC and similar events seem to be with new accounts anyway!

[jasonhernandez74]

@comradejon

very practical, minimally invasive, and likely to have a meaningful impact

To an extent, but it assumes that a new user knows the difference. The discussions on this issue suggest that many users do not.

[DianaStuder]

But that is part of the learning curve on iNat for all of us.
See the frequent Casual or Wild queries on the Forum.

I can see CNC participants who were literally active for one day. They need to be encouraged to come back. When they create a profile on iNat - your iNat puppy will need feeding, walking, and affection.

[comradejon]

Indeed! Ideally there would be some sort of informational mechanism, too.

[gcwarbler]

I may be reading through this too fast, but is it the intent of this Feature Request that, for certain events, all observers will need to make a positive choice of “wild/captive/cultivated” for all of their uploads?? That’s a non-starter.
Again I hope I didn’t overlook this, but a reasonable implementation of this might be to require the response for any taxa which are not native to a geographic area. iNat’s taxon structure already has this parameter built in somewhere; it would require some coding to identify any uploads for a given region which are “non native” and thereby prompt the required selection. I still don’t think that’s a good solution because every region has sooo many non-native species which will be documented.
(I wish Feature Requests had a Down vote or “No” vote. Maybe I’ll submit a Feature Request for that.)

[DianaStuder]

@gcwarbler

iNat’s taxon structure already has this parameter built in somewhere; it would require some coding to identify any uploads for a given region which are “non native” and thereby prompt the required selection.

The Geomodel. Could be run to detect anomalies during CNC with a popup.
This has not been found in your area before - are you sure?
Unless it is a narrow Endemic - for the Cape Peninsula the Geomodel and I agree to disagree - but then there is obvious distribution on the map (followed by IDs from trusted taxon specialists)

[gcwarbler]

Diana, I was thinking more about the Establishment Means list under the Status tab for any taxon. For instance, for Multiflora Rose, we see:

While such lists are invariably incomplete, I’m imagining that it shouldn’t be too hard to code a flag (not a “Flag”) at upload which would prompt the establishment question IF the Establishment Means for the location of the upload is listed as “Introduced”. I’m probably oversimplifying a lot of stuff that goes on in the black box that is the upload page.

[Naelin]

I think there is a problem here with the way many new users are uploading the observations: Based on the IDs given (such as a mourning dove for Bolivia, which has eared doves that look almost the same) I’m quite sure the users are choosing a picture and then going to the Computer Vision ID before picking a location, which causes it to give any creature that looks like the picture.

This makes a lot of sense from an UI viewpoint - Going from the top to the bottom of the screen, you pick the picture, ID it, THEN choose the date and location.

If this is the case, then the geomodel would not be able to detect those anomalies as those would come up after it runs. It would be preferable (and useful for everybody I think) that the ID section warns you “you have not chosen a location/date!” when you click it, maybe with a button to add it in the moment

[jwidness]

Related feature request: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/switch-upload-order-from-species-date-place-to-place-date-species/39745 (declined)

[eyekosaeder]

@gcwarbler

which would prompt the establishment question IF the Establishment Means for the location of the upload is listed as “Introduced”

I don’t think, this would work that well. At least in Germany, it seems that most taxa listed as “introduced” are wild in the iNat-sense. No one has thus far bothered to mark every houseplant and pet-species as “introduced”, as most of them will never actually make it onto iNat as “verifiable” observations.

I like the idea with prompting new users to do this on their first 50 observations, as suggested by comradejon and Naelin. As a sporadically very active, but non-CNCing observer, I think having to mark each of my observations during certain periods would completely stop me uploading during those times. There’s something about extra clicks that really annoys me despite each one only taking a fraction of a second.

[upupa-epops]

@DianaStuder

The Geomodel. Could be run to detect anomalies during CNC with a popup.
This has not been found in your area before - are you sure?

I had a similar idea once, I feel like there would be tons of situations where it fails though… Using the geomodel would probably work better than place filters like I was thinking.

@upupa-epops

Now that I’m thinking along these lines, it would be nice if a warning comment came up when you submit the first ID of a species in a country/state-equivalent on a verifiable observation, similar to the warning when you submit a rare bird in eBird. I can imagine it would might be too expensive to run these filters on every ID submission though.

This is the first identification of [Reticulated Giraffe] in [Canada]. Please review and confirm that you want to make this identification.

[spiphany]

@upupa-epops

Using the geomodel would probably work better than place filters like I was thinking.

The geomodel includes non-wild observations, though, so it would not work for the proposed purpose of creating an automatic message/requirement to check wild status for observations of taxa that are likely to be non-wild at the location in question.