Related concern:
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I think there are other ways of achieving this objective. For example, your friend could add an observation field like âAdditional Observersâ, with either your proper name or your user login, or whatever you both agree upon. Then you can search for your friends observations that have that field value.
There are other reasons why the share function could be useful, but in the absence of such a feature, there are still workarounds for your issue.
How to manage a shared observation, with photos from several observers, that happens to be a multiple-species observation? Who is asked to remove their photos? How to split the observation?
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This is already implemented in eBird, with shared checklists. Each photo belongs to a single observer, but a new instance of the observation is created for each observer on the shared checklist. Each of those instances shows the photographerâs photo, with that personâs (photographerâs) name attached. In principle it wouldnât be thaaaat different from situations where an observation is duplicated to record a different species, with multiple observations referring back to a single image.
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This feature is also implemented in the Danish species rapportation app called âArterâ where it seems to work well if inspiration is needed.
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Just here to hopefully signal to the community & staff that this is definitely a much needed feature that would simplify a lot, enrich user experience & drive up engagement on the app.
I have tried to recruit people close to me to use this app when exploring nature together and with some, like my girlfriend or mom, Iâve managed to get them hooked and start uploading. When we see something together, that possibly I even found on my own (ex. sea organisms that I bring to shore like starfish, mollusks, etc.), so far Iâve let them upload their photos and opt out of making my own duplicate observation with the same photos, to incentivise them on discovering & using the app.
The downside this brings is that I end up not âobservingâ on the app like a dozen organisms that I have no other observations of & are in areas often highly under-documented (ex. Southern Greece). Itâs definitely a bummer as Iâd love to have the full list of things Iâve found & captured on camera on my profile & observation map, and Iâm considering simply re-adding them myself too & specifying with the âsecondhand obsâ or âadditional obsâ fields to clarify, which is not really a solution.
This feature existing would immediately solve this issue and would also be helpful in giving more heavy-users the option to invite as collaborators their peers when documenting something seen together (meaning I could also involve my gf/friend/relative more by inviting them as collaborators on observations Iâm making of things I spotted while together in nature).
I really really wish we can see this feature implemented sometime in the future for all of the reasons put forth by everyone in this threadâŚ!
Thnx for reading the rant xoxo
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I agree that this could be a useful feature. However, I think several of your points can already be addressed:
If you take your own photos and upload them, there is no problem with making your own observation, even if someone else has taken and posted their own photos of the exact same individual organisms⌠The only real issue is reposting pics from another user.
You can also make a medialess observation so that the organism appears on list, maps, etc. It just wonât be RG. I do this for things I wasnât able to take a pic of.
In regards to
As long as one observation by a user has been added, the organism has been documented there - adding a second, duplicate observation wouldnât help (and could potentially lead other users to misunderstand the number of times something has been observed if they arenât paying attention enough to notice the observations are duplicates).
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Agreed, hence why I think the ability to have a shared/collaborative observation feature (two profiles, one observation) would be great in avoiding instances of duplicates, while also allowing people to have their record of species/individuals seen as full as possible, without leaving some observations entirely for others (as could be the case when two people have only the photos of one of them at their use for an organism they both observed together).
Iâd even say that while uploading 2 separate observations from the same organism seen at the same moment is surely fine as long as the media is not the same, it would be much less statistically biased & helpful to research & other users to have a single observation for said instance of encounter appear in the database. This could be achieved if those exploring together could share a single observation between them for something seen together & at the same moment.
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We have this feature working for a Danish citizen science app called Arter, which is similar to iNaturalist. Here, other users can be tagged in the observation, making the observation count as their own. My friend group finds it very useful when we are on field trips together and for bio blitzes so everyone participating gets the observation without multiple reports for the same sitting. It would be a very nice feature to have on this platform as well.
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Doesnt eBird have this too? it would be an excellent feature to have. But i guess it takes work to code it and the limited iNat dev time seems to be focused on the algorithm and new app, plus scaling for increased user base, and not much else. Hopefully one day they have time to devote to this. When iNat was new and small and easy to change there were constant functionality improvements but they mostly tapered off when it got bigger, which i guess is just the way things go, not any fault by iNat but the unfortunate cost of success.
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On your Case 2âŚif youâre seriously worried about people cheating observations, at least this would be a means of doing it that wouldnât harm any data in the slightest. There are a LOT of other ways to fake data, most of which create false data that hurts the science. And anyone who got a substantial % of their observations by linking other peopleâs would soon be discredited.
If one is determined to fake data, I imagine marking oneself as having seen someone elseâs observation would not be particularly satisfying.
If the point of allowing people to share observations is to prevent duplication of data when multiple people were out iNatting at the same time, I donât see how frequent linking to the observations of a particular user or several users would discredit the person â most likely it would merely indicate that those users frequently iNat together (family members/friends).
I do think it would be important for there to be a mechanism that requires both users to agree to sharing the observation, or it would likely result in a lot of unhappiness. There would also be some important questions about who has control over the observation â whether both users can edit or delete content, who the content is attributed to, etc. And of course, whether both observers can add IDs to the observation and whether RG would need to be counted differently (since having two people sharing an observation would basically mean they could make the observation RG without any review by other users).
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My issue with the âsharing observationsâ suggestion is that it fundamentally changes iNatâs definition of an âobservationâ. An observation, as currently understood, is an interaction between one user and one organism. The purpose of iNat is to record these observations, so 1 observer seeing 20 organisms is 20 observations, and 20 observers seeing the same 1 organism is 20 observations. No one using iNatâs data is under the impression that the number of observations relates specifically to the number of organisms that occur at a location, hence why no one actually looks at the range maps and says âwow, every common Nearctic species is most abundant around major American citiesâ⌠everyone knows that there are simply more observations where there are more people.
It sounds like one of the main arguments for this feature is a desire to more accurately depict how many organisms were seen, by preventing 20 observations from being uploaded of the same exact organism at the same place and time. But frankly, I donât think this aligns with iNatâs mission, as I understand it. Itâs primarily a tool to encourage individuals to interact with nature, and secondarily a source for data for those scientists who understand both the value and the limitations of this form of data collection. If 20 people see the same flower and think itâs cool, encourage them to all photograph it and post it. I would never dream of telling someone âdonât post that, I already posted that individual so yours would cause duplicate dataâ. To do so would be to disregard iNatâs primary goal in favor of some negligible perceived improvement in data quality.
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I think this would be a useful feature. I often go on hikes with my family and friends, and we will just take pictures with whoever has the best (or most charged) phone/camera at the time. But then at the end of the hike, we have to divide up who gets to post what on inaturalist, because we donât want to post the same organism with the same exact pictures. (We understand we technically could, but especially when you live in a small town with a not very active explore page, it is very obvious and people get annoyed). However, this means that we donât have accurate life lists. I like the way ebird does it, where you can duplicate your list. I see no reason why we canât have a copy of an observation on our observation page, even if itâs in a different âtaggedâ section so we can keep track of our data.
I do encourage people to all post the same organism, though. I think this would just be especially helpful for families.
I donât think this feature would actually help with this kind of data quality issue that much; there are still so many other factors it doesnât address. If people go and see the same rare bird independently, or on different days, then they wonât be sharing their observations. Observations of the same tree over multiple years wonât be shared. And it does nothing about the fact that observations are inevitably biased towards urban areas.
However it would make joint iNatting trips a lot easier. Sometimes one person gets more identifiable photos than the other person. Sometimes one person forgets to get photos of a particular organism, or their camera battery dies at just that moment. Currently in order to resolve those kinds of situations you have to both upload an observation, and then link to each othersâ observations.
If you care strongly about having a RG obs of a species you saw but missed photographing, then you have to ask the other person if you can copy their photos into your own obs, and then link back to their obs so you donât get copyright-striked.
This is all a lot of extra work if you regularly go iNatting with other people, and the process could be smoothed out quite a lot with a sharing feature.
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