-Privacy for their own life. They feel like they might be tracked, be it near where they live or even just in their city/state at parks they visit often, or trails they hike.
-Data secrecy enforced by someone else. People work on private land where the owners or management require them to obscure data and not give it to the public (which, rational, justified, or irrational, or unjustified, is a boundary folks generally don’t test).
-Concerns about disturbance. Concerns that others will follow up their observations and double, triple, or generally multiply disturbance to sensitive sites, even if no specimens are harmed or taken. This can happen, and we don’t know how often. Poaching would be the extreme end of the threat in this category.
(Personally, while I understand people’s concerns and reasonings, I think obscuring observations especially of common species is more harmful than beneficial to science at large, but everyone has their choice.)
I have a large research collection of Nearctic moths. There are about 50,000 specimens in it, each one labeled with date and location of capture. I also have a box of “pretty moths” that people have given me on display in my living room. They’re not scientifically valuable, as they have no data with them, but I just pop the random atlas moths and Madagascan sunset moths that have been pawned off on me in this one drawer because they look nice and I don’t want to throw them out.
I would argue that the presence of this drawer in my living room does not in any way degrade the scientific value of my actual research collection. They might not be useful, but they are cordoned off in their own box that no researcher has to look at, and I just keep them around because I like them.
Similarly, iNat has all the “data deficient” observations cordoned off as Casual where they’re filtered out from searches by default, cannot be exported to GBIF, and are in essence invisible unless you specifically search for them. Eradicating them from the site would have zero impact on the dataset that gets exported from iNat. I don’t see how their mere presence is a problem. They’re arguably not useful, but they’re not harmful either. They’re like the random box of pretty moths with no value sitting on a shelf two rooms away from my research collection. Incinerating that box won’t make my actual collection any more valuable.
I worry that forcing all uploads to have a location associated would encourage fabricating of data. Observations lacking data are neutral (not of much value, but not causing harm), while observations with fabricated data are actively harmful to research. I don’t want to take an action that risks encouraging harmful misinformation as a means of combatting a neutral lack of information.
Which reminds me of the research collections I worked in many years ago. There were “no data” specimens that were kept in the collection because they represented a species the collection otherwise lacked. Some of these specimens went into a teaching collection, used in classes. They remained useful for some purposes even though the collecting data was lacking.
As the head of moderation on iNat, I’ve been threatened multiple times from angry people, and I’ve had at least one thing mailed to me, potentially from someone angry at me about iNaturalist (can’t confirm). I don’t want easy to access data of exactly where I walk every day.
I also carry expensive cameras sometimes, so could be target. Years ago, when a rare bird appeared in Golden Gate Park, thieves noted when birders would meet up to see it and then robbed them of their gear.
I’m sort of just putting my own experiences out there for reference. I don’t obscure everything these days, and I generally prefer not to. I did however, use to have a violent stalker that harassed myself and my family for several years. I was also stalked (by my landlord!) when I was a teen. Currently the locations I do obscure, I’m sure someone could triangulate/street view to find those places, but at that point that’s less my choices of posting images and more their issue for being a weirdo, ha!
Who is it that thinks more poorly about iNat’s reputation because there are clearly-marked casual observations with no location? I understand that you do, but can you provide sources for the general attitude towards iNat being affected negatively?
When I have heard disparaging comments towards iNat from outside the userbase, it has been about captive organisms marked as wild and being RG, the attitude of established users on the site being hostile, intimidating, or unwelcoming towards people who are new or less knowledgeable, or, far-and-away most commonly, about incorrect IDs being RG. I’ve never heard anyone saying that the ability for individuals to upload casual observations is something negative.
I have one casual observation that I uploaded with date and location but no media, because I wanted to document it for prosperity and my own lifelist. It was an extremely memorable experience but I didn’t get a photo. It wouldn’t have been of particular scientific value anyway as it was a (rather spectacular) escapee (there is no burden of scientific usefulness for uploading to iNat, regardless), but it has value to me.
To me, “A main goal of INaturalist is to encourage people to interact with the natural world” does not accurately reflect the mission statement. Leaving out the rest is misleading. It is consistent with the old mission statement though.
I’ve heard this primarily from people who don’t use iNat, as a reason that they don’t like or use the site.
I think while there are certainly genera that need a lot of work overall, I don’t think it’s nearly as widespread as they think it is, since they probably formed their opinion years ago and haven’t checked back in. Dedicated IDers have been working very hard to correct IDs in error, and educate other users.
If it’s a conversation I’m involved in, I say that is part of why I enjoy using iNat – because I can actually make a difference with the knowledge I have, and also learn a great deal along the way. (Also, that there are countless wrongly-identified specimens in museum collections, as well.)
I think there’s probably a great deal of variation from region to region. Yes, there are lots of dedicated identifiers (I like to count myself among them), but the volume of observations being submitted is massive. I used to be able to easily keep up on butterfly observations for my province, and help out with adjacent provinces and states. Now I can’t even keep up with just my own province, and I’m spending several hours per day on it. It wouldn’t take long for the backlog to become hopeless in some other region if there’s nobody keeping on top of it.
And yes, the complaint typically comes from someone who isn’t involved. My point was that there are folks who look on and complain, and there are others who roll up their sleaves and get to work.
Exactly. Observations that don’t meet RG standards don’t degrade anyone’s research data. Allowing them to stay on the platform reduces the barriers to engaging with nature for some portion of the public and somewhat reduces the effort that might be wasted on policing what’s an acceptable observation.
Identifiers who only want to ID observations with accurate location data can set their filters not to show them those with obscured, private or missing locations.
Personally, I don’t mind trying to ID such observations within the limits of the info available. I also have some auto text responses I can use for missing location, date, etc. Sometimes this results in the observation being updated and reaching RG. A few of these have proved to be particularly valuable data points, so I’m glad I took the small amount of time to ask the observer to check them.
None of that negates the argument that iNat could be improved by adding in a bunch of error checking that doesn’t currently exist. There have been a few improvements in that regard in recent years (as @thebeachcomber has pointed out) so I’m hopeful we may get there eventually.
Oh this is so taking me back to when I used to admin on Wikipedia. People always used to say that about Wikipedia.
Something iNat has in common with Wikipedia is that it’s powered by large numbers of people, working together imperfectly, to do something we care about. This is unavoidably way less efficient than doing some project with a small number of skilled specialists. But in the long term, a large number of people who really care can do way more (while also producing data for those skilled specialists to work their magic with).
Observations that don’t meet RG standards don’t degrade anyone’s research data.
A demonstrably false assertion.
I’ve seen multiple references to research conducted on cultivated plant observations present in iNaturalist on this forum. Phenology thereof for example. Since they’re cultivated they automatically don’t meet RG standard.
Now that’s more to do with the blunt, all-encompassing instrument that casual status is on iNaturalist than the topic at hand here but it does disprove your assertion by counterexample.
Anyone who criticizes iNat for having records with misIDs, no IDs, bad locations, or other problems probably has not spent much time in a research museum with physical specimens. You might be surprised how many problematic specimens there are even in well-curated collections. I spent a lot of time back in the day as a curatorial technician fixing such problems where I could. It’s a human endeavour and as such it is imperfect.
People doing research using observations of cultivated plants only demonstrates that some casual observations can be useful.
It does not demonstrate the converse – that casual observations (specifically, observations missing data, which can be easily separated in searches from non-wild observations) degrade research data.
Well, I guess I should have browsed this forum before embarking on this mission, but despite being old enough to have used forums long before the smartphones/ apps advent, I totally forgot they exist.
This “connecting people with nature” mission is a huge disapointment and turnoff for me, I personally consider the vast majority of people alive today as part of the problem, not the solution.
I started to have doubts about the usefulness of this when I received an invitation from iNat to become an ambassador, with links to tutorials etc, and I realized then that’s just outsourcing recruitment.
Bitter pill to swallow, in the end I did not fully waste my time as I gained some serious knowledge and experience, but honestly I was hoping this was anything but social media for nature lovers / hippies/ tree huggers and other digital outcasts. It is what it is.
Actually it is what you make of it. You don’t have to be an evangelist for iNat. You don’t have to generate data for researchers. You said yourself you didn’t fully waste your time and that you gained knowledge and experience. So, a success.