Tania Homayoun, one of two state Texas Nature Trackers, gave an online presentation for our April 2020 chapter meeting on the importance of citizen science and how to use iNaturalist to collect and disseminate data about the flora and fauna of Texas. Here is the link to her presentation: How to Use iNaturalist
She shared these handouts that detail how to enable location services on your phone so that the geographic information is automatically pulled from the metadata from each picture.
Enabling Location Services for Phone Apps
A few questions on the webinar chat that might not have been addressed during the webinar are below. Tania has provided answers.
Question 1: What are your suggestions for observations that have no id and have been left for going on 2 years now? What are my options to obtain an id for some of my old observations?
This one we did talk about, with the suggestion to look at who the top identifiers for certain taxon are. This can be found either at the bottom of an observation or when you go into the Taxa Guide (top menu, under More) and search for a particular organism/taxon.
Question 2: I noticed on many of my observations – even after obtaining the needed ids to reach “research grade”, people will continue to submit an ID on my observations – sometimes I will have 5 or more people id’ing the observation. (with the same ID). Is there a benefit to people adding an id to something that has plenty of id’s? Most especially if they arent providing a different ID?
This one probably would raise some debate, but when you get up to that number of agreeing IDs, it’s probably a better use of everyone’s time to find some observations that actually need IDs. That said, additional agreements with an ID could be part of what’s used to build and strengthen those computer ID algorithms (“8 out of 8 humans agree that this set of images equals a Painted Lady…”).