I am doing an article about iNaturalist for the Woodland Observer, a newsletter of a naturalist club in North Bay, Ontario. I have a short list of the strengths and weaknesses of iNaturalist data. Anything missing? Strengths: Documenting aberrants Documenting visual difference between members o…

Or a button to let us duplicate the same observation so many times (for example if I had an observation of 1083 Snow Geese I could have the same observation duplicated 1083 times to represent each individual).

This option has always been available in iNat. There is an observation field called “Count – How many individuals did you observe?” This can be added to any record.

Observation is for 1 specimen only, so other than annotation there’s no need to add numbers, you can add as many geese from one spot as you want as long as you have their photo, people do that with flocks if they have the intention to document numbers, but iNat goal is not to document those, at leas…

[image] SCB: I would see the phenology data as a weakness. I’ll take the opposite point of view. The current implementation of flowering phenology is rough around the edges, and the user interface is still clunky in places, but every time I invest the effort to annotate a taxon, I learn somet…

Last year we had plants flowering in December and January, it’d cool to be able to make phenology graphs by decades, there’d be so many differences!

[image] marina_gorbunova: it’d cool to be able to make phenology graphs by decades Sounds like a great feature request to me! :-)

[image] marina_gorbunova: intention to document numbers, but iNat goal is not to document those, at least that’s the staff view on the question Could you share a link to that staff view?

You can search for topics about 1 observation = 1 specimen, I hardly remember exact names of those and remember it was in long topics about AI and attributes, but you can ask staff directly @tiwane could you please clarify that view.

’ An observation records an encounter with an individual organism at a particular time and location’ https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#observations1

Yeah I think a decision just has to be made, but as long as you are reasonable it should be fine. There really isn’t much motivation to add multiple geese, pigeons, ants etc as separate observations. And inat data should not be used for determining abundance/population size in anything but the vague…

Strengths and Weaknesses of iNaturalist Data

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Strengths and Weaknesses of iNaturalist Data

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