Please send notification to all City Challenge participants?

[cray man]

There is a boatload of city challenge observations people have made at arboretums, native plant gardens and non-native gardens, where organisms are not wild, but haven't marked them as such. Would it be too much for the powers at be to send out a notification to all participants suggesting that the correctly annotate their observations?  It might be worth explaining what constitutes wild.  What a mess. 

[Charlie Hohn]

i think you should track and have a special category for those who mark the most things as not wild (accurately only of course). let people know who is helping out

On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 7:52 PM, cray man <danjoh...@gmail.com> wrote:

There is a boatload of city challenge observations people have made at arboretums, native plant gardens and non-native gardens, where organisms are not wild, but haven't marked them as such. Would it be too much for the powers at be to send out a notification to all participants suggesting that the correctly annotate their observations?  It might be worth explaining what constitutes wild.  What a mess. 

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Charlie Hohn
Montpelier, Vermont

[Chris Cheatle]

That's not fair !!!!

Why do you plant guys want all the credit ?

I've done several thousand bird ID's from the challenge. 70% of them being Robins, Mallards or Canada Geese, brain-numbing to say the least.

I want a special category.

On Tuesday, May 1, 2018 at 8:25:24 PM UTC-4, Charlie Hohn wrote:

i think you should track and have a special category for those who mark the most things as not wild (accurately only of course). let people know who is helping out

On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 7:52 PM, cray man <danjoh...@gmail.com> wrote:

There is a boatload of city challenge observations people have made at arboretums, native plant gardens and non-native gardens, where organisms are not wild, but haven't marked them as such. Would it be too much for the powers at be to send out a notification to all participants suggesting that the correctly annotate their observations?  It might be worth explaining what constitutes wild.  What a mess. 

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[Charlie Hohn]

oh i just mean captive organisms. but of course plants should get special double credit too

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[paloma]

I can't help wondering why all the garden plants aren't automatically designated as "casual," as domestic animals are. It would make trying to help out on the city challenges easier. Those who know garden plants could filter for casual observations, and those who don't could filter for "needs ID."

[Charlie Hohn]

A lot of them are, at least in LA. 

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[Roger Kendrick]

And the no. 1 observed species in HK is an alien invasive. (Oh, No 2 is a MOTH !!!!)

On 2 May 2018 at 19:06, Nicola NEWBERY <ne...@netvigator.com> wrote:

Another problem at Hong Kong is the photographic list of species observed.  They stop at 6 observations, because there appears to be no more room on the page.  This means that the rare sightings, ie with 5 observations or less, are not included – it’s the rare sightings that are of particular interest.  The page has been clogged up with inappropriate observations of ornamental plants found in parks and gardens such as Peace Lilies, Allamandas, Busy Lizzies and Tagetes – none of which are found in the wild in Hong Kong.

 

The instruction I noticed on the HK i-naturalist site was that no plants in pots could be included – this instruction needs beefing up a little!  Maybe next year, instructions could be clearer – it is, after all, a learning curve for all of us. 

 

Regards,

Nicola, Hoi Ha Marine Park, Hong Kong

 

From: inatu...@googlegroups.com <inatu...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Charlie Hohn
Sent: 02 May 2018 18:23
To: inatu...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [inaturalist] Re: Please send notification to all City Challenge participants?

 

A lot of them are, at least in LA. 

On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 1:20 AM paloma <margaret...@gmail.com> wrote:

I can't help wondering why all the garden plants aren't automatically designated as "casual," as domestic animals are. It would make trying to help out on the city challenges easier. Those who know garden plants could filter for casual observations, and those who don't could filter for "needs ID."

On Tuesday, May 1, 2018 at 5:52:17 PM UTC-6, cray man wrote:

There is a boatload of city challenge observations people have made at arboretums, native plant gardens and non-native gardens, where organisms are not wild, but haven't marked them as such. Would it be too much for the powers at be to send out a notification to all participants suggesting that the correctly annotate their observations?  It might be worth explaining what constitutes wild.  What a mess. 

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[Nicola NEWBERY]

Another problem at Hong Kong is the photographic list of species observed.  They stop at 6 observations, because there appears to be no more room on the page.  This means that the rare sightings, ie with 5 observations or less, are not included – it’s the rare sightings that are of particular interest.  The page has been clogged up with inappropriate observations of ornamental plants found in parks and gardens such as Peace Lilies, Allamandas, Busy Lizzies and Tagetes – none of which are found in the wild in Hong Kong.

 

The instruction I noticed on the HK i-naturalist site was that no plants in pots could be included – this instruction needs beefing up a little!  Maybe next year, instructions could be clearer – it is, after all, a learning curve for all of us. 

 

Regards,

Nicola, Hoi Ha Marine Park, Hong Kong

 

From: inatu...@googlegroups.com <inatu...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Charlie Hohn
Sent: 02 May 2018 18:23
To: inatu...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [inaturalist] Re: Please send notification to all City Challenge participants?

 

A lot of them are, at least in LA. 

[paloma]

I just realized that even if every observation of a species is labelled "casual" it still shows up on the City Nature Challenge leaderboard, so domestic dog is currently the fourth most observed species for Denver. I would like to see casual observations excluded from the leaderboards.

[Charlie Hohn]

I disagree. You will throw out the rare and unusual expert stuff baby with the dog bathwater. Though dog bath water is pretty gross. 

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[megatherium]

Maybe that would be a nice compromise, keeping the captive/cultivated species off the leaderboards (and species lists?).  As I gather the majority of cities' organizers wanted to allow captives into CNC for "low barrier to entry for new users" reasons (which I disagree with for a variety of other reasons, but this probably isn't the thread for that).

[paloma]

I'm actually in favor of the low barrier to entry, and don't want to exclude non-wild organisms altogether. But there must be a way to make it easier for identifiers to find the wild organisms. It is kind of discouraging to sit down to identify wild organisms using the Identify tool, and have what seems like 100 garden plants to go through to find one wild organism. Maybe it's too much to expect people to mark their observations as captive/cultivated, and there should be a way to mark as "wild" in an ID tool filterable way.

[Charlie Hohn]

I’m not sure if it’s what you mean but you can mark as wild in the id screen by pressing either x or z (I forget as I do it without thinking about it now). It marks them as reviewed though if you offer no id you don’t get credit for one. Works pretty well. I agree the proliferation of houseplants etc on the city nature challenge is a bit annoying. 

[paloma]

What I really meant was that it would be nice to be able to use the ID tool to search for only wild organisms. I don't see a way to do that, although it's possible to search for captive/cultivated only. But that would only work if either the people posting non-wild organisms start marking them as such, or the people posting wild organisms start marking them as such. Both seem unlikely, though, which is why I first suggested having organisms that don't normally appear in the wild default to captive/cultivated.

[Tony Iwane]

Paloma, 

All observations on iNaturalist are assumed to be of wild organisms unless explicitly marked as captive/cultivated, so there is no way to explicitly mark something as wild. And by definition all observations that have "Needs ID" or "Research Grade" status are of wild organisms, so by default the Identify page only shows observations that are wild (or at least have not been marked as captive/cultivated). But yes, especially with the CNC this does mean a lot of non-wild organisms come up in Identify.

Tony Iwane

[paloma]

Yes, I get how it's supposed to work.

[bouteloua]

Hopefully Computer Vision will in the future be better trained to identify common garden plants (and humans...), which should cut down on this.

[Charlie Hohn]

you can actually vote yes for something being wild right? But since the default is es it's a lot of effort to mark them all so i usually don't mark my wild ones. I think city nature challenge and similar things will always also be City Newbie Challenge, but we just need to keep working on teachig people how to use the site. The templates for educating new users that cassi made are really helpful that way. And maybe someday we could even set it up so that automatically sends to someone the first time someone else marks their observation as not wild or maybe even every time?

On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 7:23 AM, bouteloua <cassi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hopefully Computer Vision will in the future be better trained to identify common garden plants (and humans...), which should cut down on this.

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[anisop...@gmail.com]

Out of curiosity, what exactly is the "rare and unusual expert stuff" we are throwing out if taking casual observations for CNC off the leaderboard?  The only casual observations that I can think of that might be really interesting for something like this are those that are borderline captive/cultivated to begin with (i.e., a cultivated Euphorbia species that was planted but is starting to aggressively spread and/or spread by seeds).  It just seems like the problems associated with including captive organisms (including the encouragement of observing captive organisms by including them in the count on the leaderboard) are far worse than the potential problems associated with not including them.
Part of the reason I bring this up is that I've been getting a lot of low-quality Euphorbia observations out of Hong Kong recently.  Most of these are not Euphorbia (maybe around 50%?).  Not much can be done about these except to correct the identifications.  Nearly all of the other 40% or so of these are cultivated plants.  I have gotten a handful of somewhat useful observations of pantropical weedy species, which are nice but very few in number compared to the many casual/misidentified observations.  I also went through a few of the most recent pages on identify for Hong Kong plants and I would say at least 50% of the recent plant observations there are cultivated and perhaps as much as 80-90%.  I don't know Honk Kong flora very well, but most of the plants appear to be commonly cultivated species.  If casual observations were not included, I doubt there would be much incentive for the observers to photograph the cultivated stuff, and it might encourage learning the differences between wild organisms and captive/cultivated organisms.

[Chris Vynbos]

The main way we tell if a plant is not wild is we zoom in on google satellite view and see that the location is in the garden. I'm thinking that kind of intelligence is surely less difficult for AI to achieve than working out the ID of plants and animals from photos? Can we not think about putting AI to work on achieving this, thus saying us wasted countless hours on this?

[Charlie Hohn]

I often put urban weeds and such into Inaturalist so wouldn’t want it tagging them all as not wild. It already tags certain often cultivated species as probably this. 

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