And if it gets valid results, that’s not bad. The latest subject, which I ran across a month ago and forgot about, is the identification of new species via iNaturalist, as reported by npr.org:
Sam Kieschnick, an urban biologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife, says an individual photo might not be groundbreaking — and true, you’re not getting any PokéCoins or other rewards — but each observation adds to our understanding of biodiversity, like a mosaic or pointillist painting.
“It’s just a single dot if you look up close, but when you start to take a step back, you can get to see these patterns that start to develop,” Kieschnick says.
There have been major discoveries as a result of photo sharing on iNaturalist.
In 2013, for example, a man in Colombia uploaded a photo of a bright red and black frog. A poison frog expert in Washington, D.C., spotted it and eventually determined it was a brand-new species. The pair co-authored the results in the peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa.
One of the developers behind iNaturalist is Scott Loarie. He says when he partnered with naturalist Ken-ichi Ueda, the initial idea was to use it as a tool to get people engaged with nature, and later, as a tool for science.
Making things fun seems to be the way, at least in Western culture. It’d be interesting to know how well this approach works in other cultures.
