Help Make Observations Research Grade

As some of you may have noticed, the mothership for iNaturalist Vermont will hit 1 million observations sometime this week. While this is definitely a cool milestone, here at the Vermont Atlas of Life we like to keep a closer watch on the number of Research Quality observations. These are a subset that have locations, dates, photos, and IDs corroborated by the naturalist community that can be harvested by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, BISON and other science databases.

The subset of research grade observations has usually comprised just over half of all observations on iNaturalist. We have 11,101 observations (and growing!) that have photos but have not yet become research grade.

Can you help us close the gap by putting your ID skills to task? Here's a link to the iNaturalist Vermont observations that need your help.

Let's help iNaturalist hit a half million research grade observations and iNaturalist Vermont become even better. With darkness arriving early, its a perfect time of year to be a virtual naturalist!

Posted on 06 November, 2014 21:03 by kpmcfarland kpmcfarland

Comments

Thanks to Susan Elliott for research-grading a ton of my white pine and striped maple observations!

Posted by charlie over 9 years ago

I wonder if there is or if we could have a way to rapidly ID things. So if I look at White Pine like this: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/project/vermont-atlas-of-life?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=&search_on=&has%5B%5D=photos&quality_grade=casual&place_id=&swlat=&swlng=&nelat=&nelng=&taxon_name=Pinus+strobus&taxon_id=52391&day=&month=&year=&order_by=observations.id&order=desc&rank=&hrank=&lrank=&site=&tdate=&d1=&d2=&filters_open=true&view=table. I can actually see most are white pine without even opening them. It would be neat to be able to agree in batch form. Now, this could be dangerous so maybe only certain curators have the power to do this or something. Hmmm.

Posted by kpmcfarland over 9 years ago

Nearly 200 have now been IDed. Nice work folks! down to 10.9 K left. Little by little!

Posted by kpmcfarland over 9 years ago

Yeah, white pine is practically cheat mode though. Part of why I end up putting so many of them in. Lowest hanging um... cones.

Posted by charlie over 9 years ago

heck, with this it's really easy to verify even from the air photo: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/701458

Posted by charlie over 9 years ago

I need help with the basics...how to upload a photo from my phone to the site...can't find instructions. Anneawad@comcast.net

Posted by aawad over 9 years ago

Are you trying to use the app or put the photo on using your computer? If you have the photo on the computer the second video here explains how to make an observation:

http://www.inaturalist.org/pages/video+tutorials

Otherwise it depends on whether you have an android or iphone. Either way if you have observations on the phone it should have a button that says 'sync' and that will upload them to the webpage where you cn edit them further.

Posted by charlie over 9 years ago

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