NYC Inaturalist
New York City is a hotbed of iNaturalist activity. We are coming up on our 1 millionth observation, with 35,660 observers taking part. But it's clear that most people are very casual users, and the great bulk of the observations are from a few people.
@susanhewitt alone is responsible for 9.5% of all New York City observations.
She and the next nine observers — @danielatha @nycnatureobserver @zitserm @elharo @spritelink @matthew_wills @xris @irag @elizajsyh — account for 26% of all NYC observations.
The top 88 observers account for 50% of all observations in NYC, so the other 50% of posts are from 35,572 other observers. Similarly, a full two-thirds of NYC observations are by just the top 452 people, meaning that the remaining 35,208 people who have uploaded something to this website account for just 1/3 of all observations — an average of just 9 observations per person. Nine!
I think this is because iNaturalist is still sort of hard to use. It's easy to make an observation. But it's hard to edit and it's hard to learn how to really take part in the community. There are a few ways to solve this. The usual Silicon Valley way is by gamifying and simplifying the app. And sure, the user interface could use a little love. But the best way to do it would be for us to talk to one another. Something I really appreciate about iNat users is that when we see one another on the street, taking photos of leaves or insects, we often converse. This is good! I would just suggest that next time you're talking with someone, maybe ask if they understand the app or if they have any questions. They probably do.
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Was speaking with someone today who is extremely knowledgeable who told me there was a way to use iNaturalist that would give me an instantaneous answer as to what something is. I do not want an instantaneous answer. I would like someone who knows something weigh in. I don't trust algorithms. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/160361839
Thanks Steven for the interesting post.
Good food for thought, Steven! It is kind of sad that 88 people account for half of NYC's observations. I know many people post photos of nature, plants, fungi etc., on Instagram and other social media. So clearly, there is a strong desire to share beautiful nature finds. It would be great to have those people posting on iNaturalist as much as they post on Instagram. For me, the best part about iNaturalist is being able to interact with people by tagging them and searching for experts on different organisms etc. Sadly, most of that cannot be done from the phone app.
Not surprising really. NYC was out-observed by the Greater Philadelphia area. NYC voted for the current mayor. NYC is totally car obsessed yet few have them.
@zitserm I find posting on Instagram to be dreadful. The lack of interaction is so depressing. It's junk food — feels good for a second but a mere "like" is not fulfilling. But I guess there's a reason that Pringles sell so well. People like junk food.
I like iNat a lot but I think the UX side is stagnant. I give money every month and sometimes I wonder where it's going. Neither the phone app nor the website seem to be developing. And the phone app has started crashing a lot on my quite powerful Android phone. I don't need it to be a marketing-oriented system but I would like it to be easier for newcomers to enter and feel welcomed and shown around a bit.
It would be nice to be able to push out notifications of local meetups, based on where people have posted from recently. When I was starting out, before I met Susan by chance, I felt quite isolated and confused by iNat and wanted in-person meetups, rather like what the Mycological Society does. A nature walk with 20 people where everyone can share expertise would go a long way toward boosting broader citizen science participation.
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@irag I appreciate your pessimism about NYC. I'm pretty pessimistic too. But none of those points really responds to this question. What do you mean we were "out-observed"? Do you mean in this year's City Nature Challenge? Which overlapped with 6 inches of rain in NYC? Or something else?
NYC's voting patterns don't have anything to do with people's interest in biodiversity. I didn't vote for the winner, but I don't remember any of the candidates speaking about ecology. Maybe Kathryn Garcia? A bit?
And the car culture thing is perception, not reality. Most New Yorkers are anti-car. Here's some polling. https://www.transalt.org/writing/clear-majority-of-new-york-city-voters-support-removing-car-parking-to-build-streets-for-people Typical finding: "84 percent support creating more space for children to play — including 82 percent of car-owners — even if this means reducing on-street parking. ... nine in ten Bronx voters sampled said they supported increasing space to play, as well as 88 percent and 89 percent of Black and Hispanic/Latino voters, respectively."
For hard-core users, iNat is definitely a commitment of time and effort, so it seems inevitable there will be a lot of fall-off after initial enthusiasm.
I think too that a lot of users are taken in by the supposed ease of it: just upload a single photo of a life-form and voila, you're a naturalist! When nobody can identify your silhouette of a tree trunk, a tree clearly planted in that tree pit and therefore non-wild, you may well be disenchanted.
The message not getting out there is that an observation is helped immeasurably by multiple photos, and that words are still powerful tools, especially when used to describe and contextualize poor images.
Also, when users haven't read the instructions and have their giraffe in the zoo/bonsai in the greenhouse/houseplant in the hallway observation turned into a casual, they're unlikely to find it endearing.
The phone app doesn't just lack robustness and limit observational reach: it's not a social media platform with ego-flattering feedback, which is what our tech overlord fascists have trained us to expect from aps. (Competitions like the CNC, however, push toward that nasty end, as the cooked stats-race show.)
Students who have to submit observations are a whole other problem. (As an identifier, I dread the deluge of a class project's junk data.) As with anything you're forced to do, it's unlikely to stick for most of these students.
"X is a naturalist"goes the default profile, but the system doesn't explore or explain what that might mean. It also does nothing to train users to think like a naturalist. Focusing a camera, after all, is different from focusing a mind.
@steven-cyclist I agree with you, Steven. Having meetups for nature lovers is a terrific idea. I'm glad I found the New York Mycological Society, but that's focused only on fungi. I've been lucky enough to make a few friends, including yourself and Susan, in big part thanks to the iNaturalist platform. For me, this platform serves the purpose of "social media". I exchange ideas and stories and learn a lot from others. I also make good use of the email feature of iNaturalist. I suspect that the majority of iNaturalist posters may have never logged into the iNaturalist website, and many are probably unaware that you can communicate with other iNaturalist members. I'm with you - it's all about connecting and communicating with others!
@matthew_wills I don't think we can expect the iNaturalist platform to train users to think like naturalists. The more people spend time in nature and the more they notice what's around them, the more they will start to think like naturalists. Talking to more experienced naturalists and reading books will also help them to grow - it certainly has helped me. It just depends on how much time a person is willing to commit to spending in nature and learning. I agree with you that calling something "casual" can turn people off - it's certainly not endearing to a newcomer. I am interested in studying and understanding both cultivated and wild plants. I think there is value in taking the time to observe an exotic plant - most of these plants I would never see in the wild. I know there are some people on iNaturalist who don't believe in posting anything cultivated - they believe the purpose of iNaturalist is to track only naturalized flora/fauna/funga. As for your point about photos of the silhouettes of tree trunks. When it's clear to me that someone is a beginner naturalist, I do take the time to point it out that having more photos of certain features of the plants, fungi etc., can go a long way to help with identification. For example, for fungi, it's useful to see both the top side and the underside of the mushrooms etc.
If those entering an observation could see in real time how their observation is utilized, or how many other observations of the plant have been entered from the region, or if some other feedback could be offered, there might be more interested in making an observation.
I also agree that contact with others, in person or through the site, provides both enjoyment and encouragement.
@elizajsyh Sometimes it's not even immediately clear how useful the data might be. It may not be immediately useful, but a year or two down the line, it may become useful for helping to track trends, e.g., if the species' population suddenly increases or decreases. I like the idea of showing in real-time the number of observations of the organism. One can do that now, but that requires quite a bit of effort - you have to log into the website from the browser and then search for the species on a map.
@matthew_wills I am also very suspicious of gamification and intentionally addictive social media. But as @elizajsyh suggests, there are some things that could be done here to make this site more attractive to newcomers without going down that path. Along with the ideas already mentioned, I would like to be able to share images from the app straight over to Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, etc. I also think it would be nice to have some sort of system to let you know if an observation is the first one of that species in your geographic area. That could serve both as a badge of honor (if it's really a new species to the area) and as a warning (this bug is normally seen only in Indonesia, are you sure that's what you are seeing in the Yukon?)
But overall I think that the real-life social network is where it's at. iNaturalist is at its best when it helps people learn from one another, offline. Maybe when I have lots of time I can pull together a meetup.
I do agree that real-life meetups are the best learning experience!
Although sometimes it is difficult to find a day and a time when all the planned participants are free to go out iNatting all of them at the same time.
hahahaha point well taken
Although the last time I was visiting Southern California, I did manage to put together a weekend morning iNat meet-up with a total of four people.
I had the benefit on going on many field trips with @danielatha and through him met many others in the iNat NYC community, so yeah, a meetup would be cool. He also started the Upper West Side Neighborhood Naturalists group which I mistakenly thought could be a good model (it wasn't intended as one) and appears to have petered out. I first met @xris at some Natural Resources Conservancy thing , and that was exciting and I think we follow each other on Mastodon. Every Wednesday from 8-9pm is #WildFlowerHourNYC which was started by @nycbotanist and of course much credit goes to @klodonnell whose CNC posts got me to go to Crotona Park during a break in the rain.
"I would like to be able to share images from the app straight over to Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, etc." - @steven-cyclist
It works on Mastodon! Just share a link to the observation. The observation photo shows up, with a link to the observation on iNaturalist. For example:
https://ecoevo.social/@xris/110334181845500884This also worked on Twitter and Facebook, when I was there.
Instagram is a black hole. All you can do is upload photos. And you can't link to anything.
Thanks @xris, that's true. I mean a direct link to a photo, not to the observation overall. If by chance the photo you want to share isn't the main photo, it's very slow & awkward to edit the observation to make it show up.
Also it would be good if the shareable link had a bit of text, the way newspapers always include the headline in the shared link. Like:
"Pileated woodpecker observed by @xris on August 13, 2024 in Brooklyn, New York. http://..."
@xris I thought I've pasted links on instagram. They just aren't tappable. You have to copy/paste them into your browser which is a PITA which I suppose is why most people use that phrase 'link in bio'.
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