iNaturalist research grade observations that include photographs are automatically shared with the scientific community through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which is an international network and research infrastructure funded by the world’s governments that aims at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth. For more information, the following 2017 article published in the journal Biological Conservation presents an overview of the “Contribution of citizen science towards international biodiversity monitoring.”
As citizen scientists, Master Naturalists need to aware that their contributions to iNaturalist are more than just a way to learn the name of the organism they observed. Scientists will use your data in their scholarly research. Hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and policy papers relying on data provided by citizen scientists are published each year. Therefore your postings and actions on iNaturalist are a serious endeavor.
The following dos and don’ts will help you avoid some of the major pitfalls you will likely encounter at the beginning.
DOs
- DO explore what is in the database.
- DO post photographs. Make sure you crop your pictures tight; you will not lose resolution and have a better chance of getting your observation identified.
- DO indicate if your observation is casual. iNaturalist focuses mainly on wildlife but if you want to post plants that are cultivated, pets, or animals in zoo, please check the casual box.
- DO attempt to identify your observation and use the visual recognition tool to help you. However, be aware that this tool is far from being perfect even with high-quality pictures. It is particularly poor at recognizing organisms that have rarely been observed.
- DO be patient. It can take time for an observation to be identified by the community.
- DO respect the community guidelines.
DON’Ts
- DON’T expect to get all your observations identified at the species level. This is especially true with pictures that do not capture the key features of the living organism observed. Most birds are identified at species level but most insects are not, mainly because the only way to distinguish among some species requires a dissection of the bug.
- DON’T identify the observations made by other contributors if you have not developed some taxonomic expertise related to that living organism. Depending on the organism it can be a time-consuming endeavor.
- DON’T click “agree” after someone attempted to ID your observation if you do not know why. Once you will have used iNaturalist for some time you will start knowing who are the experts but people make mistakes. Clicking “agree” makes the observation “research grade” and therefore available for scholarly research. Agreeing with a wrong identification makes iNaturalist less relevant to researchers and scholars because they need to spend a considerable amount of time cleaning up data. As a citizen scientist you want to help the scientific community by making sure that the information provided is reliable.
- DON’T start a project if you are just starting using iNaturalist.
- DON’T be upset by taxonomic and nomenclatural changes.Scientific understanding of relationships among organisms has changed dramatically since the time of Linnaeus and classical taxonomy. Reconciling the old and new systems is a work in progress.
We all want iNaturalist to be a serious repository. Thank you for helping!