I agree with what @lynnharper said above, in that the best approach is a combination of both. This worked well for our Australian study, as although there were plenty of existing experts who were long-term iNat users, there were also plenty that didn’t use iNat.
With respect to the external recruitment element, one part of our discussion is particularly relevant for you I think:
it is unlikely these statistics hold true for some genera such as Acacia Mill., Dampiera R.Br. or Synaphea R.Br., which are often difficult to identify from photographs ─ and for which there were few or no active taxonomic experts on iNaturalist ─ and thus for which a large proportion of the records in our overall dataset went unreviewed during the event. Targeted recruitment of experts with knowledge of taxa that are known to be disproportionately ignored across citizen science records will likely 1) improve the proportion of these records that are reviewed during expert ID blitzes and 2) improve the quality of future observations of these taxa, especially where experts have provided comments and guidance on which characters are important to photograph. While a shortage of taxonomic specialists is a factor that limits the success of expert ID Blitzes, unreviewed observations may be subject to future expert verification if existing constraints on taxonomic capacity are addressed, and as such have the potential to provide valuable data to aid future research.
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Not for personal or commercial benefit, its kind of a joint academic interest and conservation policy effort I suppose would be the best way to summarise it. Lots of different data sets are being used but where there are gaps in understanding the species diversity and distribution in a region I’m seeing whether iNaturalist has the potential to help us understand those areas because there are so many observations which are really valuable but unused because they are not research grade.
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This is really helpful thank you, I had been thinking along these lines as there are many taxa that lack a single research grade observation despite having good images attached just because of there obscurity or their identifying features just being hard to spot if you’re not an expert in that taxa.
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You may not ‘promote a project’ in the forum.
But you can write a journal post - then link to it in comments on obs - inviting an identifier to help.
Or you could make an iNat project if that works for you. Can be a collection project - all plants in this geographical area, or whatever.
Or a traditional project if you want to choose which obs to add.
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Thank you for this advice, was looking into making projects already but hadn’t considered the journal post approach, will explore that option. I know you can’t promote projects which is why I was maybe overly vague with the context of my initial questions but this has all been very useful, much to consider and I move forward
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