Absolutely!
I may have been one of the ones guilty of this, offhandedly.
But very much not my intention in the initiating of this thread.
I’ve actually spent a good deal of my adult life fighting for the acknowledgement of “amateur” work in my field ( not natural history ). So, bit strange to feel like I’m arguing the case for the other side here.
I think what I want to see personally is more about recognition of expertise or experience…and this is certainly regardless of conventional notions of what that entails.
It was a dragonfly observation linked on the original Gerald page, I think people kept alternatively misidentifying it as a dragonfly and a damsefly until someone managed to identify it as a Julia Skimmer dragonfly. I’m not even sure if people have successfully outbalanced the misidentifications for that one.
I’m not aware of any biodiversity recording platforms that allow users to ‘pick their own taxonomy’ to document their observations. This is not meant as a challenge, but a legitimate question, are there any?
I mean I can’t go onto EBird and say I disagree with you and think the European Herring Gull is a full species, so I’m recording mine that way and expect to see all records that way. I cant say to EButterfly or BugGuide I disagre with the Celastrina taxonomy here, so I’m using my own preferred one.
“I’m not aware of any biodiversity recording platforms that allow users to ‘pick their own taxonomy’ to document their observations. This is not meant as a challenge, but a legitimate question, are there any?”
That’s an odd question to ask, since this has always been the default for specimen-based biodiversity information. iNaturalist data even gets ingested into a biodiversity information system with this feature–GBIF. In the broader world of biodiversity information, “pick your own taxonomy” is the established norm, and “use our taxonomy” the newcomer.
For what it’s worth, among the online database interfaces, I think the Symbiota system does the best job at handling this. The instantiation of Symbiota I use most is SEINet: swbiodiversity.org
A few of the relevant features of this system are: data can be uploaded using whichever names the source herbarium prefers; when doing a search, you can check the “include synonyms” box, or not; when viewing the list of taxa returned by a search, you can have the names run through one of several synonymy databases, or view the raw names. There are a couple things it might be nice to add, like being able to choose the synonymy database when running a search and being able to run names through one of these databases in all views of the search results rather than only the taxon list view.
GBIF keeps synonyms, as well as iNat does, and shows which one was used, but there is one “main” anyway. So it’s not the same as choosing the whole taxonomy.
Why would experts identify things on iNaturalist? (I respond as a person who is an expert in some things but doesn’t restrict her identifying to those things.)
It’s fun.
It’s potentially useful education for me and for others.
It helps build a verifiable database of what’s where when.
It’s a virtuous-feeling way to avoid doing other things I should do like label plant specimens, finish the half written field guide we’re mostly not working on, or clean the garage.
A friend who’s a professor records iNaturalist identifications on his yearly report, under “outreach.”
This whole conversation stemmed partly from feedback I was hearing, as an amateur, when asking “experts” why they were not using this platform…or why my data through this platform wasn’t acceptable to them as input for their databases.
So I basically posited a solution, but without explaining the initial problem I was encountering.
Which was perhaps, not the best way to approach things, in retrospect.
I totally get that people would want to add IDs here!
I am really enjoying participating in identification this year.
For me, its surprisingly addictive, and also an amazing way to learn.
There are a few UK Diptera “experts” who do participate for exactly the reasons you mention I believe.
I guess I was yes, more just channelling the concerns of those I hear from, who don’t participate.
GBIF isn’t a recording platform, it is an aggregator of data from other places, which can and do use conflicting taxonomies. Yes you can search using any name you want, but they still use a single integrated taxonomic backbone.
Yes I can search on records submitted from their datasets as Larus argentatus smithsonianus. But if I look up that name it will tell me it is a synonym.
Searching based on multiple attributes is well built into most systems, but I’m asking about the initial recording of the data.
I’m sorry if my question which I tried to emphasize was a legitimate inquiry somehow exposes my naivety.
Every time I see those dark youngs of smithsonianus I think about why we have that old version of gull taxonomy, but then I remember about pain while iding barabensis and heuglini from distant shots that now can stay at Larus fuscus level, well, it’s not that bad.
Yes, GBIF has its own taxonomic database and we can’t change that. Although I do think allowing different taxonomic databases would be a good idea, I think this would get much more complicated and be much more work. For that reason, it is not part of the suggested changes to iNaturalist I have made on this thread.
I do go into quite a bit of detail above, if you’re interested. I don’t think anyone has proposed alternate, user-specified taxonomic databases in this thread, so I interpreted “pick your own taxonomy” in @cmcheatle’s post to be a shorthand reference to the kinds of modifications we have been discussing, and used it in this sense.
Ah, I had not thought ‘recording’ specifically was an important aspect to your question. SEINet, for what it’s worth, acts as both an aggregator and a platform into which new observations / specimens can be directly entered, so appears to fulfill this criterion.
My apologies for being a bit irritable. This topic has come up multiple times in this forum, and it seems as though it is suggested every time that the kinds of modifications I’ve advocated are highly unusual, unprecedented, or impractical to implement, and I’ve gotten a bit touchy about it. I am certain that what I am advocating here can be implemented, and is not unusual or novel within the broader world of bioinformatics. iNaturalist can change.
Judging by the other 25 IDs of new user…this appears totally inadvertent (seems strange they even happened across this observation).
Regardless of how much energy this might or might not take folks to over-turn, what concerns me is just that these kind of events might cause frustration / be off-putting for the specialist in question.
As @joe_fish suggested here, perhaps there could be consideration at least to the power an autosuggested ID has?
I’d agree as someone who’s used iNat data in papers! It’s soooooo close to being the tool I need but not quite…
Chasing of the RG designation makes some of the GBIF datasets a huge mess. My last paper- I created a project and picked specific records, then exported the dataset. I think that’s a cleaner way of looking at the data, but a lot more work on my end than just pulling location by species in GBIF.
I think the wonderful thing about iNaturalist is that it provides a huge database of verifiable (or rejectable, if I can coin that word) records.
I’ve used different kinds of data, mostly herbarium specimens and various lists. The specimens are great because I can check to see if odd records are correct. (A student worker picked up a specimen to measure and laughed, “Any more, my first question is ‘Is it correctly identified?’”) With lists and other sight records, I can’t check so I just have to throw out out-of-range and other questionable records. With iNaturalist data, I can, potentially, evaluate them.
I think scientists would do best to think of iNaturalist data as a mine full of treasures, not a factory ready to ship finished product.
Looks like nobody else responded to this part and I don’t know if you’ve since come across it yourself, but at the bottom of each observation page is a Data Qualify Assessment section with a field that asks:
Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?
[…] Yes […] No, it’s as good as it can be
If you select ‘Yes’ on a Research Grade observation that should (will) change the status to Needs ID.
Selecting ‘Yes’ for that category (and ‘No’ for some of the others) won’t notify anyone who has interacted with the observation though so it’s usually considered polite to leave a comment indicating why one of the DQA fields has been marked to bring the observation out of Research Grade (or placed into Casual, depending on the category).
It would be possible to use AI (or data mining) to create an index of reliability for identifiers that would be based solely on their participation and performance on iNat. The algorithm would gauge the members skill based on metrics including their performance (esp. accuracy) in identifying the particular taxon and include the geographical scope of their expertise area.
I’m a rank amateur with no training in biology, but my use of iNat is serious enough. I manage a rather bio-diverse preserve and am committed to doing so as intelligently as possible. As such, I’m deeply indebted to the experts who share their knowledge here, and I feel my photographs are real data – a date, a time, a location and a quality image that would otherwise not be recorded. The diligence level of an observer could also be measured using the same kind of metrics I mentioned for identifiers. I probably wouldn’t score too high as an identifier, but I’d like to think my observations would score better. A good observer rating would be likely to attract skilled identifiers.
One more thing - I do pay in a little annual contribution of iNat. I’d be willing to pay a modest subscriber fee, and perhaps that could help provide financial support to quality identifiers. Doing quality IDs is highly skilled work, and it’s valuable.
I can only see this causing problems. The first time the site has to explain why user X is getting paid to do ID’s and user Y is not, or a user learns that others get paid for the same service they are doing, there will be fireworks.
It will drive more people away than it will attract.
conversely, would this possibly attract taxonomists to contribute their expertise? in such a financially impoverished field, I suspect it might. though I largely agree that it would be difficult to put into practice without causing drama.
Yeah I’ve also wondered about this.
But not raised it, figuring it would be pretty contentious :)
Personally I would love to be able to buy a coffee or subscribe to a Patreon for the people who offer me daily support. I get that this raises allllll sorts of thorny issues though.
