What should represent a 'range' for a species in iNaturalist

hmm, for what it’s worth, i don’t agree with this for most species people are going to observe on iNat. It works great for plants, birds, and most other taxa that people are going to often come across. Spiders are somewhat unique in that they are very visible and people are interested in them, but also nearly impossible to ID. In that case it seems like defaulting to a higher taxonomic level somehow would mostly solve the problem, or at least help a lot. For reasons i won’t fully get into here, i do not myself think it’s a good idea to give people on her eExpert status via external means and ahve that affect the weighing of their IDs, but it’s something that has been tried on other sites (some of which have failed, so there is that). Maybe that is how BugGuide works. But wait… spiders aren’t even bugs…

Yeah that in and of itself is a big issue, because people are here for fun or other similar reasons, not being paid to be.

Me neither and maybe that should be more entrenched in the etiquette. However, ther eare some valid reasons to agree with the ID - for instance if the expert later quits they can have all their IDs removed (!) and under the current system you then lose the ID unless you had already agreed with it.

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Spiders are especially difficult because they are preserved in alcohol and we don’t know what most look like live. Alcohol can greatly change the color and posture. It takes a special effort to photograph them live before preservation and identification to learn what live spiders look like. No one can go around photographing specimens in museums to make a field guide.

When I’m studying spiders borrowed from a museum and need confidence in their IDs, I’ll look over the determiner names. I’ve learned to trust some people and not trust others. If I see a name I’m not familiar with, I’ll check a few of their IDs to make a decision about whether to trust them. Sometimes I remove a number of specimens from consideration because I decide that the determiner is not reliable.

People should not be assigned expert or lay person status. That creates another set of problems. Instead, each person’s view should be based on the authorities they’ve learned to trust. But people vary in their ability to identify different groups (don’t ask me to ID plants!), so the trust list varies by both group and person searching.

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For what it’s worth, I think most spiders (in my area) are easily identified from photographs. The problem is there are few experts who use photographs, and thus little primary literature and few field field guides. In my mind the solution (and best use of your time), instead of spending all your time agonizing over correcting other people’s IDs, is to examine a lot of photographs of spiders, figure out how to identify them, publish papers about how to do it, and create some field guides. That will improve the crowd consensus.

I’m trying to put my money where my mouth is: guide to identifying common orbweavers from the underside.

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I think the idea of trust filters is really interesting. I would not be happy if iNat assigned me to trust you (or anyone else) with spiders, but if given the chance to do so, i would ‘subscribe’ to you as a spider expert. Though, it isn’t an issue in my case because i won’t be overriding your spider IDs anyway, it would be absurd for me to do so.

One other thing to remember: the site is experiencing exponential growth. And it’s about to have another huge bump with the City Nature Challenge. The Challenge is wonderful in a lot of ways but I don’t think it’s the most ideal way for growing iNat as we get a huge surge of people right before the busiest time of year for field work - northern hemisphere summer - and stuff sits without getting IDs and new users aren’t engaged with as much. But… as long as we can ride these waves and keep the site functional, when growth levels off we will be able to do more building and data quality. Of course, if it’s frustrating to you, taking breaks is fine! But if the frustration is oriented towards future states of the data, there’s lots of reasons for hope (though i get frustrated about some things too)

I find it odd and frustrating that the ID suggestions provided by iNaturalist are sometimes so far off.
For example, suggesting a scale-leaf juniper might be J. virginia and the ob is in Washington state.
I also am perplexed when I see an ID such as Rocky Mountain juniper (J. scopulorum) in Italy.
And yes, some noted as planted such as the Giant Sequoia in Zurich but I’m referring to wild observations.

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You are in good company! There is much relevant discussion earlier in this thread, and also here.

Here are some more bizarre iNaturalist IDs.

In this first one, 3 people including myself indicate genus Mecaphesa. Someone else comes along and calls it Mecaphesa asperata. iNat calls this new ID “Leading” and headlines the page and search results for the specimen with “Mecaphesa asperata.” I then post a comment that the species is undescribed. Still no correction 10 months later.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/6120261

In this second one, 1 person calls it Misumenoides formosipes. Two people including myself come along and correct it to Mecaphesa. That’s 2/3rds agreement on Mecaphesa, but iNat labels it only thomisidae.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/13627933

Most of my IDs correct problems, but a small fraction seem to get randomized. (I realize it’s not actually random, but it’s so complex it might as well be.)

Mecaphesa asperata is a described and accepted taxa
https://wsc.nmbe.ch/species/40955

on the other, it has to be over 2/3rds, so working back the common parent taxa is Thomisidae

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I think arachnojoe’s point is that the first observation is of an undescribed species in Mecaphesa, not M. asperata. There is a sound but unintuitive way to deal with this: withdraw one’s initial observation of “Mecaphesa”, identify the observation as “Mecaphesa” again, and when the dialog box pops up, explicitly disagree with the identification as M. asperata. This would also be a good case for checking the DQA box that Community ID cannot be further improved: iNat doesn’t include undescribed species, so, if his ID is correct (which I certainly presume it is), we can’t identify it beyond genus level.

An identifier in the future, when a description exists for the “black tibial spot” species, could check the “Yes” box and open the observation up again for the community to concur with the reidentification. They would have to search both casual and RG observations to find this observation and correctly identify it, but given the apparent rate of spider misidentifications, expanding the search for the species over RG observations seems sensible.

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Actually even better is to id to genus, and add the details of the undescribed species (assuming it has a provisional or unpublished name etc) into the placeholder observation field so when decribed the record(s) can very quickly be found
like here https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/10629821

The apparent way to track undescribed species on iNat is to use the “tag name” tag, and that’s what I’ve been doing, so we can pull them all up this way:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?iconic_taxa=Arachnida&place_id=any&subview=grid&field:tag%20name=Mecaphesa%20sp.%20'black%20tibial%20spot'

The problem here, as with so much of dealing with observation fields, is that there are multiple ones all doing the same thing. There is ‘tag name’, ‘placeholder’, a bunch of ‘holding bins’ etc.

Ideally they would be centralized under one, but I guess using even one of them is a good start.

The whole issue of standardizing them has been extensively discussed such as
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/standardize-and-clean-up-observation-fields/363/17
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/observation-field-standardization-wiki/380

The end result, the site is not going to do it.

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I’m the one who started the “placeholder” convention, and it’s based on how BugGuide does it. The intent was for “placeholder” to name ambiguous groups whose ambiguities might be resolved later. This species isn’t ambiguous, but I do see how undescribed species could be rolled into the placeholder mechanism.

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Hi Jeremy. Here’s my attempt at a super-succinct explanation:

Arachnologists almost universally identify spiders by genitalia. Post photos of spider genitalia from the proper angles, and we can probably take them to species.

And we preserve spiders in alcohol, which changes their color and makes them floppy. So we can’t go through a museum taking pictures of spiders and expect the pictures to look as they do live. And sometimes multiple species and even multiple genera look identical until you examine tiny features under a microscope, so those could never be IDd from in situ photo.

We have to collect spiders live, photograph them live, and then examine their genitalia. Field arachnologists who have done this a lot have a sense of a number of spiders, particularly in their areas of specialty, and that sense isn’t documented well anywhere. There aren’t many field arachnologists on iNat, and I myself come and go in spurts as I get frustrated.

So we don’t have a reliable way to ID spiders by photo. But a bunch of us are trying to work all this out on BugGuide by posting live photos and then photos of genitalia so we can all come to agreement on the species. Once we have agreement on the species, we have a sense of just one color form that spiders of that species can take. Sometimes they take multiple color forms.

And until we have reliably identified photos of all the spiders of a genus in a particular area, we can’t know that some other spider of the genus won’t look exactly like the one we just identified. So we still can’t call spiders that look like this newly identified one the species we found it to be.

It’s mostly the highly visual animals that can be reliably identified by photo. Those include birds, butterflies, and dragonflies. It also includes jumping spiders – at least the males, which tend to be colorful for the same reason that male birds and butterflies are colorful.

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Also Jeremy, for an example of how this works, you might explore how four arachnologists recently worked to identify a beautiful species of spider posted to twitter: https://twitter.com/derekhennen/status/1112470447378059269

for what it’s worth, we also identify a large number of plants via examining and sometimes dissecting their genitalia! But it seems less ‘odd’ when you consider that those genitalia are things like flowers and pine cones and such. And they are a lot more visible than a spider’s genitalia

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Sometimes I feel like it wouldn’t be a huge jump from the requirements of IDing some of these sedges to IDing spiders by their genitalia…

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Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to explain all that.

But, I’m also already aware all of that. My point was that since - due to iNaturalist’s design - only the groups which are well documented are accurately identified, you might want to focus less on the Sisyphean task of fixing individual observations and more on creating better documentation aimed at a non-expert audience. Then the voting system will work, and a lot of these misidentified observations will get fixed much more easily. Sort of a “many hands makes light work” approach.

I think I may also be more optimistic than you about the identifiability of live spiders to species from photographs. There are a lot of unknowns and uncertainty about how to do it right now, but new knowledge is being created, collected, and distributed at an amazing pace. I am reminded that until Peterson published his first field guide in 1934, bird identification was in a state much like spider identification now: a focus on characters measurable from specimens in a collection, an assumed familiarity with taxonomy and anatomical vocabulary, and restricted to experts. That changed completely, and I think the same thing will happen to spider identification in time. It happened faster for the highly visually attractive species like birds, butterflies, and dragonflies, but I have no doubt it can be done with spiders as well.

Anyway, we’ve veered well off topic, I think. iNaturalist isn’t a great source for range maps for many species thanks to the number of misidentifications, the bias towards populated places, and so on. (Though occasional species have a surprisingly useful map.) I tend to prefer range maps which show the known breeding range of the species, plus regular and expected migratory corridors and wintering ranges for those species which have them. I think range maps should not include places vagrants are occasionally spotted. Although, a lot of range maps would be much improved by some indication of density, so if you did that then areas of sparse and/or rare occurrence could easily be added.

A lot of existing range maps are pretty arbitrary along the edges, honestly. While doing some field work in Iqaluit (Baffin Island, Canadian Arctic Archipelago) I was able to photograph 3 species of birds breeding there which had never been recorded breeding there before. (Junco, Savannah Sparrow, and White-crowned Sparrow. Got them published too. The Junco was particularly far north of its published breeding range.) We also failed to get photographic evidence of several other species breeding there. Before you ask, this wasn’t due to climate change, just because nobody had noticed yet. (Nunavut has roughly the same land area as Indonesia or Mexico but the population of a small town.) Another example of arbitrariness is the range map for Rattus norvegicus. There is (Edit: was; check the rather entertaining comments in the file history and the discussion tab) a hole there for Alberta, because Alberta is known to be rat-free, but rats generally can’t survive in the boreal forest and tundra to the north. The range map shows them there because they can and do overwinter in heated buildings, and they aren’t known to not be there, but they aren’t nearly as widespread as the map implies. They probably aren’t present in most mountains, deserts, and other high-altitude and arid areas. But a global map like this can’t reasonably display that level of detail.

For iNaturalist specifically, the computer vision system probably shouldn’t suggest a species unless there are 10+ research-grade observations within a certain distance, with the exact number and distance depending on the density of research-grade observations of the species.

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I can get behind that!

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Rather than trying to add all these different layers onto a map, especially given they are not relevant for many families of life, is it not better to use the mapping capabilities of the observation list. By filtering for instance to certain months, not only do you see where for example the bird is in the summer, but also potentially pick up either interesting 'out-of-range- sightings and/or records that should maybe get a 2nd look to see if they are accurate ?

Density is an intersting questionm because I’m never sure if what you see is a function of species density or observer density. Comparing northernb to southern Ontario, I know what the data will say about densities of Black-capped Chickadees, but I am less than convinced it truly says anything about density or commonality of one location versus the other.

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