Carrie Seltzer
Charlie Hohn
Sam Kieschnick
Projects can be massively successful when there are dedicated leaders, but they can be huge headaches for those that don't!
I tossed in a couple comments.
Carrie Seltzer
Any iNaturalist user can create a project. There is a separate section for advice on BioBlitzes that are their own kind of project. Here’s what you need to know if you’re considering creating an ongoing project or if you have one already.
Should I start a project?
If your reason for wanting to start a project is simply to keep track of all observations recorded in a particular geographic area, you may find that filters on the observations page is sufficient for your needs. For example, if you just want to keep track of all of the plants in Florida, you can just use the observations page filtered by taxon (“Kingdom Plantae”) and place (Florida, United States). This, however does not currently allow for observations with private or obscured coordinates. To keep track of all species observed in a private location, a project is currently the only option.
If you want to track observations within boundaries that do not currently exist on iNaturalist, try adding the place and see if then you can accomplish your objectives using the observation search filters or the place page. For example, here is the Places page for the Anacostia River Watershed.
If you want to actively recruit participants and communicate updates to them under the brand/logo of one or more organizations, then a project is appropriate.
Another reason you may want to use a project is to understand not only what organisms are in a space, but precisely where they are. Projects settings (depending on a user’s selection when joining the project) may allow for project admins, managers, and curators to be able to see the true coordinates of obscured and private locations. This sort of need will also require more attention to ask users to join the project and possibly change their settings, as well as to check the accuracy of locations.
Elements of successful projects
Nearly all projects that are successful on iNaturalist are due to the dedicated effort of the project leader to cultivate a sense of community within iNaturalist (and often also in person). This happens by adding identifications, comments, and journal posts within your project, and by generally being engaged in the community to encourage more activity in your area of interest.
Some examples of active projects include:
(please add)
Smaller scale projects, such as those covering a local park, college campus, or school grounds can be more manageable. Think of it as an opportunity to build an online community that supports and explores your local space. Elmer Oliver Nature Park (Texas) is a good example of this type of project. @sambiology has added identifications to over half of the 7000+ observations from that small area!
Tips and Tricks from Experienced Project Leaders
-Recruit additional managers or curators to your project to help with identifications and community-building.
- Try to think outside the box of just place/taxa. For instance, the Amazing Aberrants project does a lot of good by bringing together a bunch of observations that wouldn’t otherwise be found via filters. It takes more curation and involvement, but a good project should entail those anyway.
[social media integration examples? Workflow suggestions? Using guides?]
What NOT to Do
-If you create a project but aren’t active on iNaturalist yourself, your project probably won’t get much attention.
-’Required’ fields can be an annoyance to some users, especially fields that are redundant with data that iNaturalist already collects (such as time or location). It’s best to minimize or eliminate use of ‘required’ fields.
-Projects that are enormous in scope and don’t provide anything over existing filters on the site should be avoided. For instance ‘all birds in North America’ or ‘All ferns in the world’, etc. Instead, just use the Observation page’s search filters to find these.
-Don’t have the “if you build it, they will come” mentality. Making the project on iNaturalist is the easy part. Getting people to contribute is much more work and you’ll need to plan accordingly!
-Don’t try to develop a new portal or app that submits data to iNaturalist unless you have an enormous budget. It’s not something that can be done cheaply. @carrieseltzer is happy to talk about her experience doing this with the Great Nature Project to try and steer you away from that path.
Limitations of iNaturalist (what you can’t do)
Presently, iNaturalist doesn’t capture data related to sampling effort in the way that some other platforms like eBird do. The disadvantage of presence-only data like iNaturalist is that it is much more complicated to infer absence. If this essential to your project, iNaturalist may not be the best platform. However, it is possible that such features may be developed with future grant support.
iNaturalist also doesn’t natively incorporate sound, but you can include it through an integration with SoundCloud. This functionality was created with support from Texas Parks and Wildlife in 2013. If you are interested in supporting the development of a native sound feature, you should contact the iNaturalist team about including that in a grant.
Many project managers would like their project to automatically aggregate observations from a place, like BioBlitz projects do for a defined period of time. Unfortunately, this process is very computationally intensive so it cannot do this for every project. Instead, you can regularly check for suitable observations and add them to your project, or encourage observers to add them proactively.
Tony Wills
A while ago I posted a journal post, mainly wondering why people create projects http://inaturalist.org/journal/tony_wills/3505-the-purpose-of-inaturalist-naturewatch-projects. I think too many projects (including most of mine) don't really need to be projects, just a few additional fields or well crafted search terms would do.
-- Tony