The purpose of inaturalist/naturewatch projects

I have been trying to sort out in my mind how to use the inaturalist/naturewatch project feature. These comments are based on looking at https://inaturalist.nz projects rather than the larger set of inaturalist.org projects.

Why have projects? My (superficial ;-) analysis discerns a number of different project types:

1) I envisage projects as places where people can work collaboratively together to achieve some aim. Members of the project are there to achieve something beyond identifying individual observations. The project includes a place where people can discuss how to run the project and achieve its ends.
For example a collaborative project to coordinate documenting all the flora or fauna in a particular area.

2) Many projects seem mainly to be used to collect together observations in one place. But this could also be done by adding "additional fields".
(eg the "Animated observations" project.)
A subgroup of these mainly serve to accumulate a check-list of species for a particular area.
(eg Cape sanctuary.)
Another subgroup of these are just to survey or count observations in a particular area, and prompt members to do the same in their area.
(eg Kārearea NZ Falcon national count
A lot of these are potentially "type 1" projects but don't have anyone or group driving them and actively processing observations added to the project.

3) A second common purpose is to gather together observations so that a group can work on all observations of a particular type and the rest of the naturewatch community can contribute by adding or inviting suitable observations to the project. This is often used by external groups looking for citizen/crowd sourced data.
(eg "Ferns with Te-Papa".)

4) Another use of projects is to prompt people to add particular useful bits of information as "additional fields" for ongoing or later analysis, this may be the entire function of the project.
(eg the "NZ Fantail Phases" project)

5) There is a class of project which is really just to define a group of users. For instance a university course exercise/assignment. A subset of type 4 above, but a closed group just for that class, and rules defining the information to enter for each observation.

6) The final type of project is one that seems to simply be to advertise the existence of some external project, but where no effort or thought seems to have gone into actually implementing anything to do on this site. I think these tend to be the result of invitations to create a project here, without an understanding or buy-in to the naturewatch model. I suppose these are still-born type 3 projects.

Publicado el jueves, 26 de marzo de 2015 a las 01:28 AM por tony_wills tony_wills

Comentarios

One other sort... here in Vermont,USA we have a Vermont Atlas of Life project which is in a sense type 1 and 2... but also it is a place where conservation organizations (the Vermont Center for Ecostudies and Vermont Natural Heritage Inventory via Vermont Fish and Wildlife) can access data including, with participant permission, otherwise obscured locations to things such as rare species. So another important role of the project here is to make it so those agencies can have access to spatial data that they couldn't otherwise get.

Plus an outreach component. I think projects are kind of overdone... especially ones that can be attained through filters instead (every fern in New England, every pine in the world, etc)... but I do think they are valuable as outreach tools. The stats are also nice in that regard

Anotado por charlie hace cerca de 9 años

Hi Tony, Interesting post. I think there's a lot of potential to expand the '(1) places where people can work collaboratively together to achieve some aim' role of projects you mention. I'd love to one day see projects as a marketplace for citizen-science protocols to answer specific questions led by researchers.

For a totally off the top of my head example, there might be a 'marine mammal dieoff project' where the question is 'are marine mammal dieoffs correlated to environmental conditions or predation?' which is presented by a team of researchers and the protocol is 'walk a stretch of beach and record every dead marine mammal you see and note if it has any bite marks on it in an additional field'. It would be great if the researchers would report back to contributors how their contributions help answer that question through journal posts.

I think adding sampling tools like 'trips' will probably do a lot to motivate researchers to set up their projects as the possibilities for constructing appropriate data collection protocols that lend themselves to a wide range of analyses and questions is hard to do with presence only data versus protocols that include sampling ('I walked a mile of beach and saw no dead marine mammals').

Anotado por loarie hace cerca de 9 años

Thanks for the comments Charlie, I hadn't thought of the purely outreach function. And yes access to that hidden data is something I missed, especially important with so many species being obscured.

Loarie: Yes that type of research project would be great. I do worry about the non standardisation of additional fields. Each new project seems to reinvent the wheel and have their own version of the same data. Even simple things like dead or alive have multiple additional field variants. This would seem to make it extremely painful to use existing observations for new research projects even if we have a wealth of suitable records. So in a few years time when we have a chronologically sequenced resource of hundreds of millions of observations with additional field info attached, will it be useful for anything but the most basic research? Perhaps we need a meta project that works on rationalising data fields to provide widely usable information that doesn't just serve a single project's immediate needs.

Anotado por tony_wills hace cerca de 9 años

It is possible to merge fields... the problem is that people still keep making new ones. Standardization is good but there are also hundreds if not thousands of things that could be good candidates for fields so it can be hard to figure out how exactly to get enough fields set up without letting anyone create them

Anotado por charlie hace cerca de 9 años

I've done a wee cleanup of some fields (mainly orphan ones that duplicate another existing one), and merged a couple of the dead/alive ones and asked others if I can merge theirs. There is certainly a huge variety of fields and different ways of using the feature, but I don't know why there are fields like "date observed" or "todays date"! :-)

Anotado por tony_wills hace cerca de 9 años

I have done a small clean up of some observation fields, merged some things like all the alive/dead fields (consulting with the creators where possible), and deleted a few test fields created long ago.
New users definitely need some help in this area, there are quite a few additional fields like "todays date", "observation date" "notes" and "comments" which would seem to duplicate data already recorded when creating an observation and suggest they haven't actually used the system before embarking on creating a project. One thing that would help would be a way to find fields created by oneself (as a few people have recreated fields similar to ones they already had), and a list of commonly used fields to save re-inventing the wheel.

Anotado por tony_wills hace casi 9 años

I've been maintaining a list of the commonly used fields in New Zealand on the help pages of NatureWatch NZ: https://inaturalist.nz/pages/extra_fields_nz

Feel free to add to this Tony if you see some of your favourites are missing.

Anotado por jon_sullivan hace cerca de 8 años

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