Reflections on iNat After About One Year
I came to iNaturalist because I wanted help identifying wildflowers. My wife uses an app on her phone that provides an identification of photographs, but I saw that iNat came highly recommended, so I decided to try it out.
As an aside, while I am a late-adopter of apps and such things, I have been an avid observer of plants and animals for most of my life, and honed those skills as a college student.
So after about a year on iNaturalist I thought I would reflect on the experience.
- iNat accelerates learning. In the old days I would observe wildflowers in the backcountry, take mental notes, and come home to look them up in my wildflower books. Later I would take photos once smart phones came along, which was more effective than my memory. The learning process is much faster with iNaturalist, as the sum of the identification power of the iNat algorithm and the expertise of reviewers exceeds what I could get from my books. As a retired university professor and academic leader I know the value of a tool that improves learning outcomes.
- iNat has improved my smart phone photography skills. Taking multiple photographs clearly showing plant morphology increases the likelihood of the observation getting reviewed. I figured out how to get clear close-ups too.
- The volunteering aspect of identifying observations made by others on iNat is fun. This aspect of iNat combines the joy of making your own observation with helping others. I have identified something like 5 times as many plants and animals as I have observed myself. By reviewing a given taxon over time it is fun to see wildflower emergence progress northwards or upwards with the season. In addition to helping people you see some great photos and interesting locations.
- I don't see the point of the competitive aspect. I know that some folks may enjoy rankings of who observes or identifies the most, or besting others in identification, perhaps like a multi-player online game where one progresses through levels. It is useful to know competent identifiers of a taxon when one is seeking a review of an observation, but I don't know that someone with 150,000 identifications or observations is 10x or 100x better than someone with 15,000 or 1,500.
- Getting observations reviewed can be great, and can also be a drag. Its a nice feeling to see folks review your observations unsolicited. It is remarkable how often observations don't get a review. I have found the "@personxyz" tagging to be a nearly useless exercise. Messaging "top reviewers" at times feels like begging. Then you realize maybe you are too attached to the whole process and need to let go for a while. Maybe drop iNat and just get one of those plant ID apps and avoid dealing with people. But if you found a relatively rare taxon, then you see the value of "research grade" in terms of getting the observation into a spatial botanical or zoological database. This part of iNat reminds me of the lottery aspect of scholarly journal peer review, something I have a lot of experience with on both sides. But with iNat you can also just be ignored. Kind of like High School.
- The process of identifying an observation you are uploading on a phone app is tough when you have older eyes. You upload photos from your phone ('cause that's the tool you used to take the photos in the first place), then you use the app to suggest identifications, and then you compare and decide. On a phone, this last step involves comparing a tiny thumbnail of your observation with the candidate identities. That doesn't work with my antique eyes, and you cannot enlarge your photos at this stage on iNat's app. So then I go back and open my photo gallery again to get a larger view of the observation, and go back to iNat, only to find that it has "updated its database" or some such, and I must start all over again re-uploading the photos. Meanwhile I forgot the key details of my observation and have to do it all over again. I find this makes initial identifications error-prone and a little frustrating.
All told, I would say that the pluses outweigh the minuses. I've met some good folks on iNat, but it takes a while. The process reminds me of trying to learn a new piece of software, combined with trying to meet people when you move to a new town.
