I have been using iRecord for over a year and have just got iNat, should I record butterflies on both apps? I don’t know if the butterfly conservation will also get the iNat records so they may get doubled? Thanks!!
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“Now that the record import is in place, it is helpful if you can avoid adding the same record to both iNaturalistUK and iRecord, to avoid duplication of both records and of verifiers’ time.”
https://irecord.org.uk/help/linking-inaturalist
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Does that mean that it’s best to just use iNat since the records will get imported to iRecord? or vice versa?
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It’s certainly simplest to stick to using one, but it’s completely up to you. I use several. The only thing you should avoid doing is uploading the same record to more than one.
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if you use iNaturalist, your observations will automatically be imported into iRecord, as long as the coordinates are visible and the data license is open (CC0 or CC BY).
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Having been once a multi-platform poster, I came to the feeling that it is an inexcusable waste of my own time – and generally squanders human brainpower to ask for biodiversity records to be duplicated across platforms. For better or worse, iNat is ascendant and central. IMO all ingestion of records to other platforms should flow outward from here.
Try your best to pick one. I’d divide uploads by taxon so I didn’t mix things up.
It’s technically a waste of time – yours and others’ – to upload to both / multiple places, but don’t sweat it too hard. You’re doing a service for scientists, for free. Any responsible researcher should be sanitizing their data, and that includes checking duplicates.
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Does confirmed iRecord data go to GBIF. If so, would that mean records would be doubled? If so, does it matter and why?
I’m thinking here in parallel cases where bird observations are posted to both iNat and eBird.
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iRecord is just so much more convenient for recording butterflies as you can put the number and don’t have to have a picture to record and can do a specise list and not just individual records such as last year in one day I saw 14 specise and 266 individual butterflies.
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I find iNaturalist infinitely easier in terms of user interface.
But each to their own!
The context really varies, as you describe.
I agree duplication suboptimal.
But then again, iRecord should make it possible for iNaturalist users to access their data.
At the moment all of my records are being imported on to iRecord and I have no idea whether they are verified or not. It’s a huge loss for UK iNat users that this is a one-way bridge and we don’t have access to the IDs/expertise on that side of the bridge.
The only way to hear back from most UK expertise is still to go directly to iRecord.
But yes, I have given up on dealing with iRecord for the moment. Too time-consuming.
Yes. The current system appears to duplicate everything anyway!
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I think for the types of data you are talking about here (medialess observations, species lists), these don’t fit well into iNat, so it makes sense to add those directly to iRecord. But if you have single individual observations with photos, it would seem to make sense to add those to iNat and then let them automatically got to iRecord (and use the saved time to go find more butterflies!).
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