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

Or similarly, use the identify page and filter for not reviewed and click r for anything you don’t add an ID for but don’t want to see again.

Okay thank you. I forgot about marking things as reviewed.

I so much prefer the BugGuide approach. I trust their spider IDs. And when I find a problem and report it, we have a discussion, and the ID gets resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

I like iNaturalist because it’s so easy for people to use that so many more photos get posted. I’m tracking a few groups that require revision and even an undescribed species I can ID from photo. Under the iNaturalist approach, I’d rather be able to specify the people whose IDs I trust and opt to just see their IDs an no others, particularly in range maps.

Voting works when there are large numbers of experts, as there are with butterflies, birds, plants (I assume!), and even dragonflies. Reliable field guides don’t exist for spiders, and voting makes no sense for them. We aren’t even using the voting mechanism to “vote” per se. Non-experts typically throw out a guess and then just duplicate whatever we later post. That’s not voting. The experts get into a conversation and reach consensus conclusion. That’s not voting either. Maybe on rare occasions will experts vehemently disagree enough to post two different IDs, and that may be voting. It’s just not a good fit, and I’d rather the range maps reflect MY confidence rather than nonsensical voting algorithms.

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Maybe a partial solution would be to let me define a named set of people and filter search result to just the IDs by those people.

range map only with IDs by users you’re confident in:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?ident_user_id=arachnojoe&place_id=any&taxon_id=55746
^ is a start. you can string additional usernames together in the ident_user_id section of the URL if you separate them by commas

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Another thing you can do is create a project. Check out Charlie’s Curated Plant Observer List project. (Will add link when not on my phone). You could do something similar but you are limited to 100-200 users I think. (And that project is for a slightly different purpose - to create a list of users I want to do ID help for mostly). You can do a lot with collection project filters.

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@bouteloua, that possibility looks awesome, but the link doesn’t seem to do quite that. Rather, it appears to be a list of all species that iNat determines to be of the indicated taxon for which the user contributed an ID.

Curiously, the map shows one of those frustrating attempts at correction that never got corrected – not in the 2 years since. The lay folks piled up with an invalid ID, and there aren’t enough experts to undo them:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/4591882

(It’s situations like this that have me wondering why I should be spending time making IDs on iNaturalist. It takes too much time and effort to clean things up.)

so why are people agreeing to bad ids? do we need to do more education for IDs? Make it harder to ID spiders? Harder to do ID help in general? figure out that internal reputation system? All of those have some big potential downsides too. Should we treat some spider species the way we treat plant subspecies which de-emphasizes species level ID? What we do not want is people with great expertise like yours leaving out of frustration!

I agreed with your ID which is kinda against the rules (since i don’t know spiders) but bumped it to a higher level at least. But i know that is just one of many.

Also i misspelled my project title (will fix it above too - Charlie’s Curated Plant Observer List

Thanks Charlie. The fundamental problem is that the iNaturalist model for IDing species does not correlate with how species are ID’d in the real world. In the real world, most people don’t know how to ID species and so ID things to the wrong species. Only a few experts in each group know how to ID species, and if you want an accurate ID, you have to look at what the experts say, not at what the crowd consensus is. (The only exceptions are the groups for which comprehensive, accurate field guides are available and a large number of people use them.)

When software employs an inaccurate model of the world but persists anyway for legacy reasons, we end up tacking all sorts of ad hoc mechanisms for mitigating the error. That’s what iNaturalist is asking me to do, and that’s what’s difficult, confusing, time consuming, and just not fun.

I personally don’t duplicate an expert’s ID unless I can convince myself of the ID. Maybe lay folks do convince themselves by glancing at the provided ID and making a call about whether it matches. I’m sure some do this, because sometimes when I change an ID to Mecaphesa or Misumenoides, the person will come around and offer still some other ID because the variety of Mecaphesa and Misumenoides color patterns makes them hard to confirm without understanding the diagnostic characters.

The solution is to accurately model the world and base IDs on authority. Conflicting authorities can have conflicting IDs, so you choose your authority. That’s no fun for lay folks who want to participate, and since iNat mainly caters to lay folks, iNat would either need two systems for IDing or else decide that they’re okay with the popular well-documented groups being the only accurate ones on the site.

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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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