I am a fairly new iNat user, finding my way around, and so have offended some people & protocols. So I have some responses to some of the ideas in the above thread.
that’s not what iNat is intended to be used for
I’ve never really been able to work out what iNat is intended to be used for. There are some general motherhood statements, but I’ve wondered if it’s to:
- define presence vs absence
- to discover unusual or new species (clearly not, because only my ‘well known species’ pix get ID’ed, the difficult ones don’t)
- raise consciousness with the public by giving them the thrill of contributing to citizen science with their millionth pic of a sparrow in Melbourne.
- similar, give a bunch of schoolkids practice in sending pix to iNat.
- other
duplicates.
I tend to take lots of pix of the same bush - one in environment, one to show general shape, then a few closeups of leaves, fruit, flowers, bark, etc (!!use a ballpoint pen or somethig for scale!!) for ID. From camera to desktop I’ve learned how to group them as one observation, but with my phone they always come out as 6 separate observations. I haven’t found a way to fix this, so as somebody has said, it’s clumsy and reduces value. Somebody did send me a comment about duplicates, but not what to do about it, so I re-commented asking for help, and somebody else actually helped me.
I have fixed some of the phone duplicates, but jeez, it’s a fiddly process. And plus, most of my interest is away from cities, where good internet (ie, if internet exists, can you watch a you-tube with out buffering), and a month later when I’m home, I’ve got other things to do.
“barrier to uploading duplicates
Actual duplicate pix - easy photo recognition via reverse image search, using the API. But 50 pix of the same sparrow - Hmmm…
Overall, I’ve found iNat to be bloody complicated, such that even the admins of projects I’m in don’t understand it.
eg one asked for pix of ‘the kind of environment where you think you might find bandicoots’ which elicited lots of different plant ID’s and much iNat technical discussion.
eg one had me contributing but my observations never showed up, because they were using two different lists for two different parts of the operation. eg, etc etc,
As Swampster suggests, a bunch of stock copy’n’past messages held by experienced users, kind of push FAQ’s is good.
For my records, https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-turn-multiple-observations-into-a-single-observation/9838