I bet you’re right! It’s just interesting to me that even though there are many very active iNaturalists in Massachusetts, we still haven’t filled in the holes in the map for common species. I know it’s not possible (or desirable!) for everyone to drive an hour or more to a less-visited area, but the scientist in me keeps asking questions: Are “common” species really common through the state (or region)? What kind of survey protocol would be needed to establish that a species does or does not live throughout an area? How finely should the area be divided up to determine the answer? (Think of breeding bird atlases and how they divide up a state into blocks, for example.) Traditional floras and faunas often listed whether a species was documented from each county; with digital maps these days, there’s no real reason to stick to county (or town) boundaries.
And so on. Perhaps even more interesting questions would revolve around species that are currently at the edge of their ranges in a region. What would it take to establish the current edge of a species’ range, so that it could be re-studied in, say 25 years to look for changes?
Maybe a project like the Vermont Butterfly Atlas?
The state is divided into blocks and a selection are designated priority blocks. There is a 5-year survey every 20 years. Observers can volunteer for a block.
I would think this basic plan would be modified for plants.
Exactly! We can’t know how our data may be used in the future. It could be useful for studies of how a species’ range is expanding or contracting, whether plants are blooming earlier over time, whether there is a change in migration patterns, and so on.
Many studies have already been published using iNat data. (I think once a year there is a list of them, but I don’t have a link for that.)
“Global distribution patterns of unidentifiable blurry blobs”
“A revision of Russula based on only top-of-the-cap characters”
“Cultivar diversity of school grounds”
About the pink lady slipper orchids… I have seen an absolute explosion of them this year in my area. I have been here ten years, walking the same area. There are definitely new ones.
I don’t upload them all, but do try to show the lager and smaller examples. The locations of some of them seem odd to me, as they seem to be from wetlands to the drier areas.
I’m sorry this is such a late reply - I hope it’s not a big nuisance to comment now.
This is a thing I think about frequently, especially since I have become more and more aware of the environmental cost of our server centers…
More and more I find myself deleting observations that aren’t quite perfect, will never be identified, present no novelty, or that I just feel people don’t like. It’s hard to reason out how important some close-up of a lichen really is when the energy used to keep that picture perpetually alive on some server may pollute the air enough to force its extinction.
Also worth noting: In the last year I’ve become acquainted with how burdened the group of hardcore identifier seem to feel, so I feel incentivized to delete my stuff whenever I can.
I guess my take would be to try and consider the life of your observations and what impacts they may have around you. Ultimately mammals get much more attention and research dollar so the benefit-per-observation for much of that repetition is likely far greater than something that’s not actively funded for research. There’s also of course the personal satisfaction and joy you may get from it to weigh in too.
It is hard to anticipate the value of one’s observations. What may seem common, overdone, or excessive may be of great value to someone interested in that organism. I work on one of the most commonly abundant lizards in the United States and see dozens and dozens of observations of this thing in the active season. And while it requires effort to keep up with the identifications, is never an unwelcomed burden since each observation gives me a time, a place, and a visual glimpse into the existence of that thing. Please please please keep posting observations of even the common things, of things that seem redundant, of things that seemingly add very little because they still add something to someome’s unstanding of that thing even if you haven’t met that someone yet.
I didn’t read through this thread again, but the passenger pigeon was once the most common birb in North America, numbering up to 5 billion. They used to darken the skies. The last one died in 1914.
I’m pretty sure no iNatters would be complaining about “too many passenger pigeon observations” uploaded in the 1800s.
That should tell you everything you need to know about uploading “common” species.
the takeaway from the ‘burden’ is to help ID (or annotate) where you can.
For my own obs, I prefer to upload what I feel has value (in focus). But sometimes a bad photo is still worth it, for the record.
Having many observations of a given species allows us to assess intraspecific variation. A colleague and I are describing subspecies in a common species of Lomatium. We’ve examined every iNaturalist observation to assess variation in the traits.
One important trait for us is flower color but it fades as the plants are dried, collectors rarely describe it, and we can’t fully trust any written descriptions of flower color. (Does “yellow” mean bright yellow, pale yellow, yellow-green, or what? Does “white” mean the living petals were white or that they died and faded?) We’re using iNaturalist photos to determine how variable the colors are and where the color forms grow. The iNaturalist photos also showed us some color forms we didn’t know existed.
The observations also helped us figure out a complicated little taxonomic knot in the San Francisco area that includes variation in a different species. The fairly dense posting in the popular Columbia Gorge area helped us figure out that there is an ecological difference between two color forms there. iNaturalist has 4,000 observations of this species and we’re grateful for all of them. Well, nearly all of them. But seriously, every one that is identifiable and has good location and date is valuable to us.
Keep posting. You don’t know what people will want some day.
