The value I find in iNaturalist

Several reasons not to visit iNat:

• It is like Facebook, where you spend inordinate amounts of time browsing around, and looking at your own posts.
• If you want to use it to make solid IDs on bees or ants or other speciose taxa, your chances of getting beyond genus are low.
• If you ask iNat to guide you to species ID, the chances of the algorithm being right are low, at least for bees. It will do better on butterflies or anything where a photo contains enough information.

Advantages:

• Networking. If someone is looking for PNW bee enthusiasts, they will find me for sure. And Brianna Lindh, and Lisa Robinson, and Marek Stanton.
• The quality of IDs from other users is variable, but often stellar. e.g., John Ascher or August Jackson for bees. Or zdanko or trinaroberts for syrphids. And the best thing about these folks is that they are conservative - they back you off to genus wherever the photo doesn't nail species (often).
• There are a slew of projects that exploit big data aspects of iNat. E.g. pollinator associations (330 host associations for Bombyus melanopygus for example). E.g., Washington native bee society (1100 records for B. melanopygus).
• For taxa that you don't know - say, collembola or mushrooms - you can at least get close to an answer.
• A big one for me is that iNat is an efficient way for me to catalog my own observations. If I want to find the flies I saw in Michigan, or the Bombus I saw in CT in 2018 - the search is simple.

I could go on. But aside from what iNat does for me, its greatest value is to nurture interest and provide information to nearly 3 million, mostly non-scientist users.

Publicado el 03 de septiembre de 2022 a las 07:35 PM por cappaert