Any utility in adding casual observations to iNat?

[Tim McNamara]

Kia ora all,

In a recent trip Greytown (https://inaturalist.nz/journal/tim-mcnamara/20975-camping-in-greytown) I encountered a few birds (several piwakawaka, tui and the occasional kereru). I haven't added them as observations, as they would necessarily be marked as "casual grade" because I didn't take recordings of them.

As casual obs are not forwarded on to GBIF - do people think that these sorts of observations are worthwhile to record?

[Colin Meurk]

I think they are worthwhile. People can judge themselves as to their reliability. They may usefully fill in a range, or alert someone to a possible extension of range - to be checked. At some point we will try to get a change of policy in what gets forwarded to GBIF. c

Sent from my Samsung device

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[Jon Sullivan]

Kia ora Tim,

That's a good question. 

Casual observations (those without supporting photos or recordings) are not currently forwarded on to GBIF (for everyone else, that's the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, https://www.gbif.org). Only the wild observations with confirmed identifications ("research grade") are sent on to GBIF.

That doesn't mean that the other observations are not also useful for research though, and scientists regularly access all of the iNaturalist data directly (e.g., via the rinat package in R, https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rinat/index.html).

The reliability of your observations without photos/recordings can still be assessed using your other observations with photos/recordings. If you've added 50 observations of fantails with photos or recordings, all correctly identified, then when you say you saw a fantail we can be confident you got the ID right. 

This means that for active users of iNat NZ, observations without photos/recordings are certainly very valuable.

The more important issue, in my mind, is whether observations were collected as part of a survey ("I saw a fantail while doing a 5-minute bird count") or casually ("look, I saw a fantail"). Observations made with surveys can be used to generate robust trends and detailed habitat maps. Casual observations are good for making species lists, maps and inferring coarse trends.

So, in answer to your question, yes! You might have made one of the only kereru obs from that area that week. So it could well be useful, especially if you're other observations demonstrate that you know what a kereru looks like.

Note that if you do a survey, there are observation fields you can add to your observations, like "Searched for all birds" (https://inaturalist.nz/observation_fields/1868). See our General monitoring fields at https://inaturalist.nz/pages/extra_fields_nz

Cheers,

Jon

for the iNat NZ team