About a year ago, I posted some preliminary results from a study I conducted for my PhD, looking at an expert assessment of identification accuracy for Australian iNat records. That research has just been published today, and is open access here: https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ppp3.…

I would also note that many “traditional” bioblitzes (ie, those focused on creating rather than IDing observations) themselves are volunteer events. Apart from the organizers, most participants are there in a volunteer capacity.

Fantastic and fascinating! So, if I’m reading the paper correctly, your experts identified both Research Grade and Needs ID observations, while you and your co-authors were particularly interested in measuring how accurate those added IDs were - is that right? Here is the northeastern United states…

[image] lynnharper: So, if I’m reading the paper correctly, your experts identified both Research Grade and Needs ID observations, while you and your co-authors were particularly interested in measuring how accurate those added IDs were - is that right? not quite. We operated under the assump…

Ah, I wrote incorrectly - I did mean you were looking at the accuracy of the pre-existing IDs on your group of observations. Finding experts for difficult taxa is not easy, if only because there are so many observations that can never get even to genus due to a lack of photos of the necessary chara…

Congrats on the publication! Great that you were able to quantify and quality the contributions of such events. I agree that putting more focus on improving the capacity of identifiers would be very helpful to keep up with iNat’s growth. These ID Blitzes sound like a very good way of doing so! In t…

[image] thebeachcomber: In comparison, expert ID Blitzes ─ which increase the value of biodiversity datasets by instead adding new identifications to existing occurrence records ─ are far rarer and greatly underutilised despite their clear value. There used to be ID-a-thons.

Hi @thebeachcomber these are a couple of great projects that have both ID and annotation blitzes on a regular basis, it is amazing how the numbers of research grade observations can be increased over a very short time period: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/uk-hoverflies-syrphidae https://www…

We’ve done ID-a-thons for Oregon plants. Gotten lots of ID’s.

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 att…

The value of expert identification blitzes

General

DianaStuder April 11, 2025, 3:00pm 17

Is it this project?
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/getting-paid-to-id/53630

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The value of expert identification blitzes

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