I have many observations that are in need of an ID, but haven’t been given research grade, or there’s not enough diagnostic evidence from the organism to give it research grade. Should I just delete these observations? Many of these observations of mine are arthropods.
No, you shouldn’t if it’s a wild animal
I notice that some of your observations are casual (captive/cultivated). You can delete those if it’s in a museum, zoo, or any other exhibition place.
But if it’s an uncommon animal in a pet market, or another people exotic pet, it still holds valuable data even if it’s casual.
I wouldn’t do so. First of all, you have made the observations because of your personal interest, joy about the organism, curiosity, etc.
iNaturalist is not a place only for “research grade”.
And you could never know if today or tomorrow the right taxon specialist will come and add the needed ID.
Perhaps there is waiting that new unknown organism in the bunch of not research grade obs yet. If you delete it, nobody can discover it in the data set.
Oh, definitely not. There is always time for someone to come along and ID it and larger higher taxa can still be relevant in some cases. You can if you really want to but there isn’t any reason to.
Please don’t delete them. Especially if someone has put time and effort into adding an ID already (even a broad one) I would only delete something blurry which was an unintended mistake.
I have deleted unidentifiable observations of mine, only a handful that had terrible photos that I believe are not possible to ID. However I do not recommend doing.
It’s up to personal preference
No, absolutely not.
Whether an observation reached research grade is almost completely irrelevant to its actual ‘value’, and it’s very common for observations of certain classes of life, or from certain parts of the world, to languish for years before getting a community ID.
You can read through he comments of this post, especially as if gets farther down the comment thread to see what the community take is on deleting non-research grade observations as one person there said they do.
I wouldn’t even consider deleting any genuine observations.
(The only exception to this might be where the data quality is severely lacking – eg the date is unknown, or location is only known to country level, or the photo is extremely blurry – meaning it could never conceivably reach research grade.)
I don’t believe there is any maximum time observations should be allowed to sit unidentified. Example: I’ve been visiting Madagascar every year for 22 years, and have uploaded all my flora & fauna observations from every trip. Many of the more obscure taxa remain unidentified, but in the past 12 months someone has suddenly identified many of my crickets and grasshoppers, and somebody else has identified a lot of my millipedes. So you really never know when your observations might reach research grade. Maybe some will not get IDed for another 20 years, but then they will become scientifically valuable.
In my opinion, if an observation of yours has received any interaction from others in the community, then you should not delete it. I mean if it has had anyone attempt to identify it, even at non-species level, or if anyone has made any comments, or favorited it, or if it has received multiple views, then leave it up.
But if no one in the iNaturalist community has interacted with your observation in any way - zero comments, zero attempts to identify, zero views, zero favorites - then I see no detriment caused by removing it. I do so myself when no one shows any interest in an observation.
No, don’t delete them! If you want to picture how a non-RG observation can be valuable, consider this: I use observations, including or even especially unconfirmed ones, to plan iNaturalist excursions to find interesting stuff. A couple of weeks ago I was traveling and stopped off to look for an interesting Sphagnum that someone had posted months before. I didn’t find it (turned out they had the coordinates wrong), but this led to a helpful conversation back and forth so I know where to go next time, and I will, because it looks like something that needs to be verified. So the whole process can take years. I’ve got 38,600 observations and 8,060 of them are not RG, which is fine. They’re all hypotheses waiting to be tested.
A question for the community:
If someone posts an observation, and the observation receives zero interaction whatsoever for a month or two, then what do you think about deleting it and re-submitting it, so that it will (presumably) appear at the top of lists to be identified? If “needs ID” lists are presented in chronological order, with the most recent ones appearing at the top of the results, then would it not behoove the observer to delete and re-submit, so that the observation gets greater exposure to the masses?
… … …
Please, no one put this on “slow mode” … doing so kills the real-time chat dynamic and reduces the overall engagement. Hundreds / thousands of page clicks and comments are what we WANT, not something we’re trying to avoid!
No, thank you. If it came up before, and sigh, we recognise that again. No.
Not all IDs target was it observed TODAY ? Or yesterday at least ?
OTOH if you make the second obs with field marks – then maybe it deserves a second chance.
No again. Slow mode came from tiwane. We want many people in the discussion. Not a monologue. iNat is not a clickbait site.
I don’t see any harm in deleting and re-submitting this way, but unless the observation is a complete Unknown, I think you’d get better success tagging someone who’s an identifier for that taxon. If someone tagged me with a comment like “I know this isn’t a great photo but can you help me narrow it down?” I’d pay attention.
The observations that receive no initial attention are often some of the most important. For example, the following observation is that of a rare species that occurs only in a single canyon system: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/162222378
The fact that it hasn’t received attention bears little on the observation’s value. Two important reasons why observations go unidentified include: 1. it doesn’t fit neatly into any one species or 2. it’s a species that very few people currently know how to identify. Imagine a common scenario where someone collects a plant which represents an undescribed species. It lingers for decades in a herbarium without attention. Then, when the right person comes along, it is recognized as something new and exciting. This is often how science works, long periods of waiting followed by bursts of interest.
If you want to delete your record, you can, but you should know that you’re opting out of being part of this process when you do.
On a more general note, this is one of the drawbacks of viewing iNaturalist through the lens of social media more than through the lens of natural history collections. Social media is about what’s relevant in the here and now. Natural history collections focus on documenting and preserving what we know now and allowing access to further our understanding across generations.
I try to think like a curator. From that perspective, I accept that the full potential of my observations and specimens may not be fully mined until after I am dead and gone.
Others have made the points I’d make on iNaturalist observations, so I’ll add something broader. I’ve been listening to a podcast by ABC called History Or Hoarding? that delves into the State Library of New South Wales. They collect an absolutely incredible variety of stuff, much of it things that would seem pointless - all the way to stickers from supermarket fruit, which you’d think nobody would care about, but every so often a product designer or historian or filmmaker will go look at them to see what exactly a 1980s supermarket banana in Sydney might have looked like.
They also keep things that seem unkeepable - for example, they have a few massive glass plate negatives for some of the largest photos ever taken, measuring well over a meter on the long side and just under a meter on the short side. One of these glass plates shattered due to a storage accident - and they scooped up, counted, and filed away the shattered fragments. Decades later, an effort was made to rebuild the photo from its shattered parts, which would have seemed an impossible wasted effort when the negative first broke.
All this to say: archiving is a valuable process not because it yields results right away to the person donating the item, but because archives can prove valuable to unknown strangers in the future in ways we can never fully imagine, both because people’s interests and activities are more varied than we’ll ever know, and because technology and history continue to change the context in which future people will evaluate those archives.
So, broadly speaking: please don’t delete your observations!
I think this touches on an interesting broader issue of communication in iNat (and other platforms, like Wikipedia’s new page patrol). I’m a high-volume identifier for certain taxa. Besides the fact that I ID a lot of them on gestalt, I couldn’t keep up that volume if I were adding even a partly automated comment with every ID. Most people don’t respond to those comments, so I don’t feel the need to try. But if I disagree with someone and they “@” me to ask why, I’ll generally respond. They took a little extra time to show that they’re receptive, which reassures me that putting more time in will be a productive investment.
So when you put an observation on iNaturalist and it gets no interaction, does that mean:
- No one is looking at it and no one cares
- People are looking at it, it’s missing some detail necessary for ID, or IDing will take energy and concentration because it can’t just be done by gestalt, and they’re passing on without writing a long explanation of why they passed it up.
You can’t tell!
If I had an observation that I thought should have been confirmed quickly, but wasn’t (e.g., your hickory), one strategy I might take would be outreach to identifiers. Look at the leaderboard, filter it by geography (maybe state or county), and tag one of those identifiers on the observation asking politely if your photo is identifiable or if in the future they need more details. Obviously don’t do this for fifty taxa at once and burn out the identifying corps, but that kind of careful, measured outreach might get you a detailed response that an observation alone won’t.
Because iNaturalist is social media, some of the same rules apply for getting more knowledgable eyeballs on your work (and not have to wait for a high-volume but sporadic specialist identifier). People like to see visually interesting and rare species in their area of interest, and they like aesthetic, high-quality photos. If they realize you are a source of those, they are more likely to follow you and browse your photos over morning coffee, and click “agree” when they recognize something. A little “networking” can help people realize that you’re generating cool photos.
Some regulars here are pretty dogmatic about ratios of identifications to observations. I’m not, but I think it can help build those connections. Fire up the “Identify” modal, limit it to your state or even county, and look for some really easy plants (like mayapple) where you can ID confidently. Sometimes I ID a fern for an insect person and a day or so later I see improved IDs popping up on some of my insect observations. Social connections to other nature groups can also help; lots of people are on iNat and friends will often help ID each other’s observations.
Some observations will also get lost, even if they have useful photos, because most observations of that taxon don’t have the necessary detail and identifiers don’t want to wade through a sea of useless photos. So if I decided to go big on, say, sedges, I might actually start by contacting a few people who had ID’d a lot of Carex in my area and say “Hey, I’m planning to observe a bunch of Carex. I take good pictures; what in general do you need to see, and if I include that, will you keep an eye out and try to ID my observations?” This is exciting for identifiers, not just because it’s more fun to see an informative observation that can be confidently labeled, but because getting more research-grade observations improves the accuracy of the computer vision, so there aren’t as many observations incorrectly ID’d to species level that have to be knocked back to genus.
To actually answer the original question, there are some threads here where high-volume identifiers talk about their workflow, and it often involves some level of randomization, working from back to front, and so forth, so I don’t think the delete-and-repost strategy really works for them. It might get you extra eyeballs from people who are following that place and missed it the first time, but I think expanding the pool of people looking at your observations is probably a better payoff than “churning” them repeatedly through a similar pool.
As has been mentioned to you several times elsewhere where you’ve expressed this opinion, removing it is detrimental, and people not providing IDs on an observation is completely unrelated to interest. There are many reasons why this happens, as has also been explained many times.
Sometimes observations attain research grade 2,3,4,5… years later.
I sometimes go through older high-level observations (generally plants) and honestly, I’d be reluctant to give a hard yes or no answer to the original question. I’ve found things that have been sitting for years that I can push straight to species, but I also see a lot that I don’t believe can ever go anywhere because there’s just not enough information. Sometimes it’s just a distant shrub or tree that’s utterly unidentifiable, sometimes it’s a single leaf, etc. - and even if it were one I’d moved to Dicots (say), I’d be perfectly happy with such ones being deleted because I don’t believe they serve any useful purpose. The problem is, it can require a certain level of knowledge to determine whether this is one that should just wait patiently or one that will never go anywhere (though some I seriously wonder why anyone bothered in the first place - sorry!).