iNaturalist ranks right up there with Wikipedia in importance.
It is more than one organisation, but rather a central org + a network of regional organisations. The regional organisation provides a lot of biological technical expertise. Citizen scientists alone would not be able to correctly handle the complex taxonomic issues you have in biology… or even basic identification in many cases.
Where the organisation(s) sometimes go awry, in my personal opinion, is forgetting they are the custodian of citizen science data, not the source of it.
I had this same mindset, and when I travel to somewhere less-traveled, I always like to post photos on iNaturalist and map parks and trails on OpenStreetMap to contribute to the open tech ecosystem.
A year or so ago someone asked Reddit for examples of how iNaturalist is used by scientists. I go on Google Scholar and it's papers about crowdsourcing, community, classrooms. I didn't see papers where the data was part of researching the plants and animals (knowing where to study, unexpected sightings, changes over time) like Budburst. Maybe biologists are doing that off the record and I'm 100% wrong, but it shook my perception that these are observations and I should upload yet another desert gecko sighting.
I work in a large conservation organization focused on rare plant conservation.
iNaturalist is sometimes used by our ecologists/biologists as a starting point for collating occurrence data.
The iNaturalist data itself is likely specifically being pulled from gbif. Then they go private/specialty databases that have more spatially and taxonomically accurate records.
But iNaturalist data is often not considered high quality enough to be publishable by itself (wide brush statement) in my field of plant conservation.
We've tried to have some conversations with iNaturalist and they weren't really interest in talking, gave me pause on what their motives as an organization are.
But conservation tools are few and far between, and iNaturalist is a really powerful tool for initial data exploration.
GBIF track the use of data we provide to scientists, where they later publish papers citing that data [1]. For iNaturalist, the list of known citations is at [2]. In most cases a download of data from GBIF will include data from more than one dataset (iNaturalist is one of over 110,000). To find how particular records in a download were used — or even if they were discarded — requires reading the paper.
As an example from the list, "Aedes albopictus Is Rapidly Invading Its Climatic Niche in France: Wider Implications for Biting Nuisance and Arbovirus Control in Western Europe" [3] cites 5348 iNaturalist records.
Ah, what a wonderful role. I'm sad I've missed the application period, maybe one of the only jobs in tech I'm specifically qualified for :(.
I should add the asterisk that my anecdotes on the presumed legitimacy of publishing solely iNaturalist data comes from conversations I've had in the American endangered/threatened plant conservation community. More common or non-American species occurrence data from iNaturalist likely has more legitimacy being used directly in publications.
In the US we have a series of government/NGO controlled databases that house sensitive species data, so often our scientific community has to operate through them to get access to publishable information (of which the raw data is then often obscured, just used for analytics). In my experience iNaturalist data is often a good starting place for determining which government bodies/NGOs a biologist should start reaching out for requesting data access.
I love GBIF and have a priority this year of making sure that my organization plugs-in what we're willing to share via IPT or Biocase!
> But iNaturalist data is often not considered high quality enough to be publishable by itself (wide brush statement) in my field of plant conservation.
As someone who recently started using iNaturalist, I've been curious about this. I think it's an awesome platform and really cool that people can share what they find, etc, but I noticed that people would pile on with species-level IDs on pictures that were obviously ambiguous between different species known to exist in the vicinity.
I of course want as much data as possible to be available to science, but it piqued my interest about whether a negative feedback loop of misidentifications to future identification models could form.
It's interesting to contrast with Wikipedia. I'm not deeply involved with either, so I'm talking out of my ass and would be curious to hear other people's thoughts here. But Wikipedia has gone to great lengths to make the data side, Wikidata, and the app/website, decoupled. I'm guessing iNaturalist hasn't?
The OpenStreetMaps model is also interesting. Where they basically only provide the data and expect others to make Apps/Websites
That said, it's also interesting that there hasn't been any big hit with people building new apps on top of Wikidata (I guess the website and Android app are technically different views on the same thing)
I’m not convinced that that’s an accurate view of Wikidata. Wikidata is a basically disconnected project. There is some connection, but it’s really very minimal and only for a small subset of Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is 99% just text articles, not data combined together.
Frankly, I think the reason people haven’t built apps on top of Wikidata is that the data there isn’t very useful.
I say this not to diss Wikimedia, as the Wikipedia project itself is great and an amazing tool and resource. But Wikidata is simply not there.
I am also frustrated with Wikidata. The one practical use I've seen is a lot of OpenStreetMap places' multilingual names are locked to Wikidata, which makes it harder for a troll to drop in and rename something, and may encourage maintaining and reusing the data.
But I tried to do some Wikidata queries for stuff like: what are all the neighborhoods and districts of Hong Kong, all the counties in Taiwan, and it's piecemeal coverage, tags different from one entity to another, not everything in a group is linked to OSM. It's not a lot of improvement over Wikipedia's Category pages.
Wikidata is a separate project, specifically for structured data in the form of semantic triples [0]. It's essentially the open-source version of Google's KnowledgeGraph; both sourced a lot of their initial data from Metaweb's Freebase [1], which Google acquired in 2010.
> But Wikipedia has gone to great lengths to make the data side, Wikidata, and the app/website, decoupled.
A big part of that is that different language editions of wikipedia are very decoupled. One of the goals of wikidata was to share data between different language wikipedias. It needed to be decoupled so it was equal to all the different languages.
Having never used iNaturalist, but as someone who believes that Wikipedia might be one of the most important knowledge resources created in the last 100 years, I'd love to hear more about why you think this.
It’s a living biodiversity record. That kind of data has had an impact on things like: understanding human impact on the macro environment, ID new species, provide scientists with more accurate population distributions etc. Perhaps controversial, but the data has also been critical to computer science, specifically computer vision and AI algorithms. eg what’s the bird in this picture?
Between iNaturalist and Wikipedia, for me iNaturalist is the more significant of the two. I use iNat every day, have many tens of thousands of observations, and using it I've learned to identify thousands of birds, plants, bugs, fungi, and other things out there. Now I can name trees, plants, birds, et al, but more than that I understand better how they fit together into ecosystems. Also I've learned a lot of taxonomy which actually helps inform my view of the world a lot. In the process I've connected a lot more to nature, and thanks to iNat (and eBird) I now spent a lot more time doing meaningful things exploring wild spaces and spend less time scrolling on web pages. Wikipedia's invaluable as well, and completely indispensable, but between the two it's been less significant for me actually directly learning about the natural world I live in.
I use it a lot. My ex is a biologist and they use it a ton.
It's a massive dataset. There's nothing quite like it. The way people collaborate and verify information on iNat is invaluable.
The best thing about iNat is the passionate people on there. If you don't know an ID, just post it and within a day someone will correct it. It's crazy.
Download Seek and go try it out. Make sure to sign up for iNat and connect your seek to iNat so you can contribute.
Why do you recommend Seek? I’ve been using the iNat app (though since it was released, they’ve been asking me to upgrade to the newer app) and it seems fine. Take a picture or upload an existing one, get recommendations for ID, then upload to the community for further consensus!
Seek is annoying, because it throws up some kind of „please don‘t disturb nature“ dialog box every time you start it to take a photo. I hve seen that warning hundreds of times, why can‘t i disable it after a few confirmations?
I‘ve moved to the main iNaturalist app, and it does everything Seek does, but better and it’s generally also faster.
It is more than one organisation, but rather a central org + a network of regional organisations. The regional organisation provides a lot of biological technical expertise. Citizen scientists alone would not be able to correctly handle the complex taxonomic issues you have in biology… or even basic identification in many cases.
Where the organisation(s) sometimes go awry, in my personal opinion, is forgetting they are the custodian of citizen science data, not the source of it.