This is a really interesting perspective and has me questioning the most effective way for me to use iNaturalist for my current project. I’m focused on Vascular plants in Spain at the moment and wondered whether people think it’s more effective to reach out to experts external to iNaturalist and attempt bring them onto the platform to do an identification blitz? Or should I be focusing my efforts on reaching out to identifiers already in the community to try and mobilise identifications of key taxa in my target regions? I’ve been involved in plenty of citizen science projects in the past but normally face to face with the public doing outreach and running workshops so navigating the digital community is new territory for me!
For context I’m interning on a project aiming to use satellite images and remote sensing to build better biodiversity models and it’s in the early stages where we’re trying to “calibrate” the models by making sure that they line up with existing biodiversity data. However some areas don’t have enough data available on GBIF to meet required threshold and I’m trying to bridge the gap using citizen science data by ensuring as many observations as possible are uploaded.
Hope this is okay to ask, would love to know whats worked best for anyone in a similar situation in the past.