As an academic and taxon specialist, perhaps my perspective will help. My appreciation for iNaturalist came slowly, then all at once as a series of epiphanies. I was a member for about two years before I really started using the site seriously.
The first realization was as observer. I realized that I had quite a few photos sitting on my computer that weren’t really doing me any good, but that perhaps this community might be interested in. As part of this, I realized that at my passing those would just go ‘poof’, that no one was going to be able to use them because I was the only one who knew where they came from. So, one winter break I started uploading all of my observations initially as a means of saving them for posterity, but then as a means of contributing to the available date for my primary study species. Doing this with the thousand or so observations of that species led to my interest in identifying.
Initially my role as identifier was quite selfish…I wanted to understand my own study species better. It was a particularly snowy winter that year so I ended up identifying every observation of that species. About 10,000 identifications into that process I realized I could/should be collecting data on the mis-identifications I was encountering as a means of estimating the accuracy of existing IDs. That got me hooked as it became apparent how easy it was for me to ID and how some people struggled, but could be improved as identifiers with a few pointers. So, my second epiphany was there are data projects to be had relatively easily.
A series of personal tragedies led me to turn to identifying as a means of distracting myself from things I didn’t want to think about. However, that led me to my third epiphany in that identifying forced me to figure out what the relevant traits were to ID something to species. The little box that was ever-present saying ‘tell us why’ meant I could transfer my knowledge bit by bit to the community. Again, the realization that I knew things that others wanted to know meant I could provide value-added to the community by clarifying not just WHAT something was, but WHY it was that thing.
Doing this led me to my first project as an attempt to centralize some of that information and tips withing iNat itself. These started as notes to myself, but ended as notes that anyone might use instead of having to pour through endless keys or species descriptions. That is, by identifying obsessively, I realized that I had a really good eye for picking out the relevant differences among taxa.
Eventually I realized the effect that all this had on me, which is to make me much better at being able to distinguish among taxa as well as fo understand the biogeographic distributions of those taxa. This epiphany was a welcome surprise and is one of the biggest reasons I advocate for taxon specialists to get involved in IDing…it’ll make you a better biologist. For me, it has allowed me to see things like rare occurrences (predation or feeding events) as well as get an understanding of the variation present in my study species.
The final epiphany was that there are quite a few research opportunities if I can just. figure out a way to harness the power of the community. We like to say that one should assume people mean well on this site, but it’s more than thst…people want to help on this site, but often don’t know how. So, as a supposed expert, I can guide efforts that might enhance the available data over time. This ranges from telling people what they are seeing in terms of taxon, but also behavior, or age or sex of the things they are seeing. I can do these things at a glance because I’ve been doing it for decades.
My current feelings are that iNat represents an underutilized resource that provides free environmental monitoring.
…that we biologists might be able ti detect change in real time if we are clever enough. There are at least four ways I’m using iNat to provide data.
First, as a real-time window into species extinctions through species current occurrence and eventual absence.
Second, a means of tracking how species move around due to climate change. Given that biologists have already documented ample evidence of low-latitude extinctions and high-latitude colonizations, being able to monitor existing populations for these changes due to climate change is a powerful draw.
Third, temporal changes inactivity are occurring just as spatial occurrences are changing. So being able to document firsts and last for species means changes in biological timing (phenology) are possible with data from iNat.
Fourth, once I understood biogeographic occurrences of certain sister taxa, I began to notice patterns of what can be described in evolutionary as reinforcement. That is, where species come together, the pattern in variation became explainable in the context of those lineages reinforcing their differences as part of the speciation process.
I’ve talked about these ideas with a number of other academics and usually meet with enthusiasm for what I am doing, but reluctance or resistance to actually do it themselves. Many view the community as a bunch of amateurs who don’t really know much biology, but that has not been my experience at all. I have met a number of well-trained individuals as well as autodidacts, who always impress the hell out of me for their ability to self-teach.
The biggest hurdle seems to be getting over the ignorance of what iNat is and what it can provide. There are a lot of misconceptions in older academics about why they should invest their time, what the value to them is, and why what they have to offer is of value. Part of this is that the work academics do on this site isn’t easy to justify in any of the typical categories of teaching, scholarship, and service. iNat has made this easier by allowing one to do things like quantify how many observers one has aided and I’m quite proud of the fact that I have helped over 70,000 observers identify their observations. So the service provided by each of those micro interactions might not seem large via any one ID, in aggregate they mean that I probably have reached many more people through 18 month as a serious identifier than I ever could in a lifetime of teaching. For underserved communities, such as in the tropics, the impact is probably even greater than any one ID can convey.
Sorry for such a long-winded answer, but I wanted to convey the various ways that both observing and identifying has affected me as a biologist. Moving forward, I anticipate building on the relationships I have begun by helping guide observations, by potentially making trips to interact with some of these people, and by continuing to reinforce a skill I took years as a biologist to develop and now get to give back to this community one interaction at a time.