Here is something I’ve written on another topic, but something important:
It is not about just CNC. Let’s become data analysts of our own. In this thread, we will take out these stats - which people do not see.
Insects (especially outside the popular groups like Odonata and Lepidoptera) are inherently more difficult to identify and need more of an expertise… this problem exists on other platforms (such as BugGuide) as well. Personally, I specialize in northeastern Reduviidae and try and take my time to get my ID’s as accurate as possible… my number of ID’s come out to be FAR fewer than my observations. And the more ID’s I make, the more time on iNat I end up using to justify/defend/discuss those ID’s. That’s just for one single narrow taxonomic group!
I think I’d rather spend my time making IDs than pulling together and interpreting statistics.
I don’t know why. I have made 12803 ids and have only 766 observations. That is more than 15 times the number of observations. I work on a related group, true hoppers (Hemiptera - Auchennorhyncha. I think that they are not too hard (and they cannot be hard if we identifiers make guides for all possible groups. Right now I am working on several guides at once)
Basically what it boils down to is that it’s easier to observe insects than it is to ID them…
Всё просто. Виды различаются по простоте наблюдения и простоте определения. И очень весомую роль играет качество фото. На фото банально может не быть отражено диагностических признаков что делает определение невозможным по умолчанию. Плюс существует выраженный перекос в профессиональных идентификаторах. В моей стране,к примеру, прилично ботаников, а вот бриологов, альгологов или лихенологов - едииницы. Поэтому растения определяются достаточно бодро, а мхи с лишайниками особо и некому определять, иисключая распространённые простые в определении виды.
This is partly true. Just because someone is a ‘nerd’ and has not published any papers does not imply that the person does not know much. Oftentimes, even “the common species” have several misidentifications, mostly due to CVM, and for other causes too.
Pull out your data/stats. Try using a different group. It is not specifically about insects.
Also true is that people do not take interest in identifying insects. For one thing, there are so many, secondly many cannot even be identified from high res images because of several reasons, like the ones noted by @nilshelstrom above and also the fact that much is yet to be discovered/described.
If you are not interested in this topic, pls. do not write things like this on it. That is your choice to do such data analysis.
I would love to see your leafhopper guides! Currently I rely too heavily on the generous IDing of @nomolosx and others.
What sum gives you the 49.72% please?
Since many insects are not identifiable to species level (as pointed out by @nilshelstrom), and an observation can only become RG at species level, many observations are actually ID’d but are not RG. So in the case of insects, the lack of a RG mark should not be synonymized with the lack of an ID. It would be nice to know what percentage of insect observations has not been identified at any level (just the observer and nobody else). This may give a more meaningful representation of the statistics regarding the presupposed ‘neglect’ of insect identifications.
Sort of, but this can be mitigated by someone voting “No” for “Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon be improved?” in the Data Quality Assessment if the Community Taxon is below family and above species. For example, see https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/266502489
But it doesn’t happen that often, and you’re definitely right that just because an observation is not at RG doesn’t mean someone hasn’t identified it.
The fact of the matter is that while both observing and identifying are voluntary, there’s a way higher bar to identifying of any sort - and the bar is much, much higher for a group like insects (speaking as a plant person but with some idea of the sorts of insect photo quality some people upload). We can’t force people to ID and wouldn’t get good results if we did. If you want to try to fix the imbalance, you need to be inspiring people with an interest in identifying insects and helping them build their knowledge, not complaining about a problem that has no easy fix.
There are certainly some inherent problems with the field markings of insects being more difficult to photograph, but I do think there is room for improvement even with the existing photo data.
I think this is an interesting case where having a user-driven ID wiki could be very helpful. If an expert and potentially one or two community members editing for clarity can explain the field marks of a species or even just a genus or family, and then everyone else can see that explanation when looking at the taxon page, that might make it much easier to convert completionist or curious observers into identifiers of that taxa. As it stands, I think there’s a high barrier between someone posting an observation and noticing it’s not getting identified by anyone, and figuring out how to identify it oneself. Reducing that barrier could be one way to help tackle the problem.
We have jumped this. I literally checked everything with google, where did this screw up??? Fixed it anyways. That is a bigger difference - 46.3% of identifiers are responsible to deal with the workload cause by 72% of observers. Observers exceed by 64.3%. great imbalance.
I haven’t found that my butterflies and dragonflies are any more likely to get to RG than other insects, and framing it that way disregards the hard work of the identifiers who specialize in ants, bees, and hoverflies (among others), which I nearly always see IDs on.
In addition to the question of whether a species can be IDed from photographic evidence, there’s also the matter of what amount and quality of photographic evidence is needed to do so. Some birds can be identified with just a few pixels. But I often find that even with multiple decent pictures, the best it may be possible to do for insects is genus. And it takes more skill and equipment to get those pictures in the first place, because insects are small and often fast-moving. In other words, it’s harder to make research-grade observations of many insects than it is of the taxa that are more likely to get to research grade.
Guides. We need a project to make as many guides on various taxa as possible. It is an unfortunate fact that most of the guides are so local and not very useful, often without any data added. I think that if I needed to know which birds I will find on a certain place, I would certainly use ebird checklists instead of a guide, and for mammals etc. of a local area, I will search iNat records. If you are making a guide, make it for taxonomy, otherwise it is a waste iNat’s server space, which is very expensive for the iNat team. If you want to make a guide, pls. make something reasonable. Guides being “as is” is another problem of its own. Pls. avoid local guides. If you make a guide on similar species, or on something iNat actually needs, that is what we want (and need).
1: How do you know I work on hoppers?
2: I do not id NA/Europe hoppers and especially not Cicadellinae (subfamily) because there are enough identifiers there, so not much for me to work on. Most my ids are from areas receiving less attention - S. America, Africa, Asia and sometimes Australia. Pacific islands are filled with interesting ones which nearly no one is there to id.
Agree so much. I have time for this but no one will support me.
To quote my response the last time this was posted:
And to add some more numbers, here are the % RG observations for all the animal phyla represented on iNat by more than a single observation:
Chordates Phylum Chordata 90.9%
Echinoderms Phylum Echinodermata 77.1%
Brachiopods Phylum Brachiopoda 66.7%
Mollusks Phylum Mollusca 61.8%
Arthropods Phylum Arthropoda 54.7%
Priapulid Worms Phylum Priapulida 54.3%
Cnidarians Phylum Cnidaria 54%
Horseshoe Worms Phylum Phoronida 50.6%
Cycliophorans Phylum Cycliophora 50%
Comb Jellies Phylum Ctenophora 48.1%
Ribbon Worms Phylum Nemertea 45.5%
Velvet Worms Phylum Onychophora 45.2%
Sponges Phylum Porifera 43.8%
Nematodes Phylum Nematoda 37.6%
Flatworms Phylum Platyhelminthes 37.1%
Bryozoans Phylum Bryozoa 36.7%
Xenoturbellids and Allies Phylum Xenacoelomorpha 27.3%
Thorny-headed Worms Phylum Acanthocephala 19.5%
Segmented Worms Phylum Annelida 17.6%
Entoprocts Phylum Entoprocta 10.7%
Rotifers Phylum Rotifera 9.9%
Hemichordates Phylum Hemichordata 9.2%
Arrow Worms Phylum Chaetognatha 6.2%
Gastrotrichs Phylum Gastrotricha 4.7%
Mud Dragons Phylum Kinorhyncha 3.4%
Tardigrades Phylum Tardigrada 2.9%
Horsehair Worms Phylum Nematomorpha 0.8%
Dicyemids Phylum Dicyemida 0%
Jaw Worms Phylum Gnathostomulida 0%
Placozoans Phylum Placozoa 0%
Arthropods are not at the top of the list, but they’re certainly nowhere near the bottom either. It’s merely a list of phyla in order from easiest to hardest to observe with a camera. Vertebrates are some of the biggest, most charismatic animals, so they’re unsurprisingly at the top of the list. Spots 2-4 are largely driven by seashells and sea stars, some big charismatic things that you can easily pick up and photograph when you find them, as they’re often found dead. And then there are Arthropods at 5th place, beating out all the rest of the Animal kingdom. The least-identified are, as expected, the tiniest things that are hardest to get images of, like rotifers, tardigrades, and gastrotrichs.
Even within the Arthropods, insects are doing pretty well:
Crustaceans Subphylum Crustacea 66.4%
Hexapods Subphylum Hexapoda 56%
Chelicerates Subphylum Chelicerata 43.4%
Myriapods Subphylum Myriapoda 30.4%
Again, crabs and lobsters are big and charismatic and often easy to photograph, so crustaceans are #1. And then insects come in second place, above chelicerates (arachnids) and myriapods, both of which are similar in size to the insects.
So my take-home conclusion from all these numbers is that insects fall exactly where you’d expect them to fall in terms of “% RG” based on their size, diversity, and difficulty of identification. Harder to ID than a vertebrate or a seashell, but easier to identify than the smaller and/or simpler forms of animals like sponges, jellies, and microorganisms. Observers outnumber identifiers across the board, whichever taxon you’re looking at. And the harder they are to identify, the fewer people will identify them. I don’t see insects as being particularly “underserved” on iNat, any more than one would expect for a phylum of numerous yet relatively small organisms.
These numbers are based on species richness, but try thinking about raw number of organisms for a second. According to a 1994 study, roughly 4 out of every 5 animals on earth is a Nematode. If you want to see an under-observed group of animals, that’s where the focus should be. Copepods are up there too, possibly outnumbering insects according to some estimates. Why is this post about insects rather than Nematodes or Copepods? Because insects are, relative to these other taxa, “just what is easy to see with your eyes”. Given that this is a platform where you see things and then photograph them, the result of things that are easier to see being seen more often is pretty much guaranteed.
I guess I’m just not sure what the plan of action is that this post is meant to encourage. Should we be avoiding posting large charismatic organisms and focusing on smaller ones? I don’t think iNat is here to tell people what they should and shouldn’t observe. And no matter how small you go, you’ll run into an enthusiast researching something smaller.
If you say “stop posting these birds and post more bugs!” you’ll soon hear “stop posting these huge bugs and focus in on the springtails!” “Why is everyone posting springtails and ignoring the Gastrotrichs?” “Why all the love for Gastrotrichs and still ZERO Lorciferan observations?!?” “Why all these big 20+ micron metazoans when we should be focusing on the much more numerous Prokaryotes??” The answer is the same all the way down- because the smaller you get, the harder it is to see identifying features and actually identify things. Not everyone can afford an SEM, a regular light microscope, or even a phone with a decent camera. But we still want everyone out there connecting with nature in whatever way they can.