I am on my town’s conservation board. For those of us using iNat to track information in our towns, Places are critical.
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re: PLACES. Most people do not need to make a Place.
I’m on the conservation board in my town. We use iNat to track various things within town boundaries. I used a KML file extracted from a GIS system to create our municipality’s boundary. Perhaps you could just disable the polygon tool - it’s wonky anyway - and encourage the creation of legitimate Places, i.e. towns, counties, nature preserves, etc. from GIS systems.
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As has been said before, 50 verifiable observations should not be difficult to make - I think most people could do it in a day or two.
And I think having knowledge of iNat will really help when in this case towns try to promote its use to constituents. I have seen many many projects and outreach done with the best of intentions, but by folks who haven’t taken the time to understand and use iNaturalist, and thus they have a lot of difficulties answering participants’ questions, or setting a project up correctly, etc.
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I wouldn’t want to be taught to use a nail gun by someone who hadn’t taken the time to figure out how one works… :)
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i still fail to see how asking a teacher to create 50 observations before making a project will somehow make that teacher better equipped to prevent / address things like copyright infringement, hate speech, plagiarism, and inappropriate body parts by their students. even with many observations under my belt, i never really thought about those issues myself until reading some of the comments in this forum.
maybe more experience making observations might help teachers think about asking students to group multiple related photos into one observation, avoid putting multiple unrelated photos into one observation and maybe flag casual observations, think about using geoprivacy options, etc., but to me, that seems to be a bit like that game where you whisper something to someone, and that person whispers the what they heard to the next person, etc… the message always gets garbled by the end.
so if you want to make sure students get a consistent message, it seems to me like the right thing to do is to make a short, easily translatable video or two to tell them exactly what you would like them to do and not do. i know that sort of guidance exists in faqs, teachers guides, and other scattered resources, but videos are a little bit more shareable and easily digested by people with short attention spans like kids, i think. so the messages you want to get across should get across more consistently, and it would save teachers some prep work, allowing them more time to go out and do things like practice observations. that seems like more of a win-win path to me.
maybe in your teacher guide, you could strongly recommend that teachers of students below a certain age enlist the help of parent chaperones or other teachers to monitor things online and in the field. if i were managing a bioblitz of 20+ kids all by myself, i know that i would have a hard time doing that, and i would probably be out in the field watching things rather than online watching things. if kids knew that their parents were online and watching, then they might be less tempted to engage in bad behavior.
(or maybe if you want teachers to be able to take a more active role in managing bad student behavior to take some of that burden off staff and curator shoulders, maybe you could give teachers some administrative control over their students accounts – sort of a way of doing “student accounts” like some people have been asking for. a student would grant a teacher or other adult(s) special privileges to censor their observations, read messages, etc., and that teacher ID would show up as the student’s supervisor so that people could reach out to the teacher to discuss issues.)
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by the time they get to 50 obs, they will realise it is a community and people are behind it, not just some fancy technology… I know my first “connections” in iNat came before I got to 50 obs.
Also, and alluding to the nail gun situation I brought up in jest… If I want to learn how to use a nailgun, I will learn from someone who knows how to use one (at least has used one sufficiently to know the basics) or I will teach myself (google is wonderful!)… but that assumes I want to learn! A teacher will be directing others to use the site, and if the teacher can’t be bothered to put up just 50 obs before expecting their students to do so, then that is exactly the attitude they will be teaching their students! We will have students that can’t really be bothered “doing things right” cos they have too much homework to do… etc etc… This idea that you can get away with doing something “half-ar$3d” because you are too busy is rubbish, and maybe teachers need to learn the old adage of “do it right first time!”
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I don’t think it’s an issue of being bothered… i think it’s more of a time prioritization thing. thinking back to my own first set of observations, it took an average of 5 min per observation just to take the photos and then another 1-2x the time to upload and ID everything. so that means at my rate, it would have taken 4 + 4 = 8 hours just to get to 50 observations. and that still would not have prepared me to address a lot of the things that have been pointed out here as problems. if i did less walking around and stayed in a smaller space where there were a lot of organisms to see, i think i might be able to halve that obs/min rate nowadays (with more experience), or i could lower the quality of my observations to also reduce the rate, but maybe that defeats the point of making 50 observations?
if i were a teacher, i probably would do 20-25 observations, give up on making a project / place because i couldn’t spend more time on it (other, higher-value prep to do), and maybe just try to manage everything through existing places or bounding boxes in the Explore view. that would just annoy me because it actually would me less effective in being able to manage a bioblitz.
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exactly. and those who can’t prioritize learning the community and the workings of the site, probably shouldn’t be unleashing 30 duress users on it. If it isn’t a priority, we should not be the ones asked to pick up the slack. They should use Seek, or go use Project Noah (if it still exists) or something like that.
I can easily get 50 verifiable observations in an hour or two. Granted if you are new it will take longer. But it’s not an onerous task.
Basically what you are advocating for is to have volunteers in the iNat community pick up the slack for teachers who want to use it. I’m not even opposed to doing that in some settings, but the volume is far too high for the community to actually curate. It does look like you do some ID help, have you not run across this problem? Try searching for any plant species in Los Angeles County.
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that’s not what i’m saying at all. i’m saying that these quotas don’t seem like they would address a lot of the problems that have been identified and might even make the problems worse in some cases.
this is a bit of a tangent from the original discussion, but i haven’t really come across any volume issues related to IDs. i follow activity in certain parks and neighborhoods (which include universities that do bioblitzes), but i don’t follow whole counties or states. especially when i see more observations than usual come through, i prioritize my time on IDing things that are unlikely to be IDed by others (to the extent that i can), fixing bad IDs, and marking things as not wild. even if i can ID something like a blue jay, i tend not to, because i’d prefer that others (newbies especially, and the original observers, given appropriate time) get a chance to ID those easy things, and i figure nobody will care if another blue jay doesn’t get added to the data set out there. every once in a blue moon, i’ll review stuff in my parks and neighborhoods of interest to fill in gaps and make sure things are copasetic, or occasionally, i’ll go through and fix certain taxa that look particularly bad, regardless of geography.
here’s curly dock: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?iconic_taxa=Plantae&place_id=962&subview=table&taxon_id=53197. there are a few bad IDs, but they’re not research grade. there aren’t a lot of research grade observations, but who cares? what exactly is the problem?
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Well, there are 7 million observations needing id. That’s higher than the number of observations with ID and increasing rapidly.
There are some huge problems in LA county and many other areas but I doubt I’m gonna convince you of it so… leave it at that. Just because you don’t see the issue doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
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straying off topic again, but i think the way to get things IDed is not to limit observations but to promote the number of potential IDers. i’d much rather the effort for quotas go into something else instead like showing a little indicator on a person’s first x number or first day’s worth of observations and IDs so that the community can be particularly welcoming (and gentle in criticisms) when they see these come through.
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I think those are all good ideas.
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About 30 mins or so for me
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re: Places
This is pretty fascinating to me, as I’m somewhere upwards of 600 observations and have been a bit frustrated by the pin clusters – I assume that I’ve been using them wrong the entire time. I’m used to eBird, where hotspots and personal locations are nicely clumped and fairly well defined.
Guidance would be appreciated!
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hmm, in what context are you looking and finding too many cluster? Roving the main map of all observations can be pretty daunting and slow, but if you filter by species or use the map on the species page, the maps are wonderful and avoiding the location lumping of ebird allows for much better precision mapping! If you’re trying to use the app to view observations… well, the app just doesn’t work that well for that right now.
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iNaturalist is quite different to eBird in how it deals with locations. In eBird, locations such as hotspots show a pin that can refer to a checklist from a broad area such as a wildlife refuge, or a 5 km hike route. In iNaturalist, it is preferable for each observation to be mapped as precisely as possible to where the individual organism was seen. So please do continue to map each observation to where it actually was, and don’t worry about the proliferation of pins on the maps.
For those using data to map the fine-scaled distribution of a species, or to find correlations with environmental variables, iNaturalist data, with individual locations for each observation and an estimate of precision (the accuracy circle) are superior to eBird data.
The “places” referred to here are a different sort of place - a polygon of an area that can be used to define projects and produce checklists.
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Excellent idea, kueda. The hurdles are low, if anything.
If you wanted 50 research grade observations, I would object, because that might lock out someone like danaleeling because there may not be enough identifiers familiar with Micronesian plants. But 50 verifiable observations can be gathered in well under 2 hours with an app-equipped smartphone and the ability to upload without breaking the budget.
Working with an older camera (non-geo-tagging) and a computer might take several times that long, but the requirement is still reasonable.
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Thanks for the feedback, all. These changes have been released, so I’m going to close this.
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