A PLEA (in 15 chrs)

Dear Anthony, I was adressing the Southern African community. They seem like enthousiastic amateur naturalists to me, and ispotnature is not the right place for that. It is merely good enough for people with no particular interest in nature out walking their dogs etc.(Maybe it is intended to be like that, I don’t know.)
Uploading an observation is way too laborious for a starter (just one in fact, suppose you wanted to upload more than one observation!).

The ‘ispotdatabase’ is above all a vast pile of nonidentified and misidentifed specimens.
Check this, the statistics of a similar database for a small country like Belgium: https://waarnemingen.be/statistiek.php?lang=en&local=be .

By the way, forgetting the ‘change feature’ in the rewrite is very telling of how the people responsible for ispotnature value the efforts of its users…

Maybe someone could speak to cicuta58…I have no issues to report with Chrome but all issues will probably have a solution.
You could pass my email address to him. [email protected]

IIRC, the problem is Chrome on old versions of Windows. Chrome uses the version of SSL built into Windows, and the iSpot server is not backwards compatible with old versions of the SSL protocol. I passed some details about this onto Cicuta shortly after the new release. (One solution is a new computer; I’ve also suggested that he try the Android app.)

I thought the app. was discontinued
I can access iSpot normally on on my Android Tab (but don’t!)

You could be right. I’ve been ignoring Android access to iSpot for years - I prefer then real estate of a real computer.

And so are many museums and herbaria! This is a cop out and illogical argument. Compare it to the IDs on Facebook.

At least on iSpot I can get a Hoplinii or Scorpion (or whatever) Expert to visit and do all the IDs as far as they can be done, Exactly as a museum would invite a world expert to visit and curate their “mess”. It is the way science works. The problem is simply getting enough material to get an expert interested: and that requires lots of observations (and they dont need to identified or even correctly identified), preferably semi-identified so that the expert can find them readily (experts are also usually experts are fixing wrong identifications of similar-looking taxa). All one has to be is patient.

And I have been told that iSpot is in very good company - the Paris Museum has boxes of southern African plants from the mid 1800s that have not even been curated - so I will happily concur that iSpot is slightly better than the Paris Museum in terms of curation and ID.

One can just use another browser too, like Firefox. However, on an old computer, ispotnature will be extremely slow.

Exactly my point, Tony. Nobody wants to risk his/her mental and physical health using a website as inefficient as ispotnature or inaturalist. And certainly no expert ever will. If you want to involve experts, use something that the experts would use themselves. There exist much better platforms out there. The stats for waarneming.nl (dutch version of observado.org) on Tuesday 12 september (poor weather): 11.901 observations and 3.512 photos added (1.833 species). Thát is the kind of thing that attracts experts (and professionals).

Pretty sure it doesn’t work at all if you go too many versions back, I cannot get it to play with IE9 at all. But lots of other websites don’t like versions that old either.

Sorry, i beg to differ (although i do believe you are also totally correct)
Yes there is no way in hell that one can identify to species or sub-species level without all the relevant data, but it is actually those “in the know” that should guide to ensure that the relative photo’s are taken/presented to ensure a correct ID.
So inefficiently is also just a lack of guidance, ie. if you do not know what to photograph, you never will, but on the flip side, if one is informed, the novice may become the teacher.
By the way. would hole heartily agree, if you just want an ID, you will never learn how to ID on your own, and just keep on looking at pretty pictures as a source of identification (sic).
Unfortunately, we believe that those in the know really want to share knowledge with the masses in the hope that more will get an interest/love for their field of expertise. Is this not the basis for a CS platform???
As far as Ispot is concerned, I truly believe they have lost the plot, and thus inadvertently moved in the direction of a Facebook set up. On the other hand, Inaturalist is seriously trying to move forward with the CS concept, and may eventually (if Ispot does not wake-up) be the only logical learning platform (as far as CS is concerned).

I personally find inaturalist much easier to use than either ispot or observation.org/waarneming.nl/waarnemingen.be.

But observation.org/waarneming.nl/waarnemingen.be is a bit different than inaturalist or ispot or project noah etc. because its not really geared towards photos so its not really fair to compare stats.

observation.org/waarneming.nl/waarnemingen.be is more like ebird, another site that is focused less on images and it generates hundreds of millions of records, but very few have photos and much less social interaction - its more a data archive into which people and institutions can bulk upload their archives and less of a social network for sharing photos and getting comments and identifications from the community (as in ispot, project noah, or inaturalist).

I’m looking at the observation.org stats https://observation.org/statistiek.php and it looks like while people have contributed 19.5 million observations there’s only 1.5 million photos. And these are from only 9000 people. in comparison inaturalist has 6 million observations with one ore more photos uploaded by 146,000 people http://www.inaturalist.org/observations.

for iSpot southern Africa we have stats to June 2017 (we launched in June 2011) is:
4 670 users (who have contributed - not registered users who have only registered - but any contribution - ID, agreement, observation or comment)
313 513 observations
I dont have any stats on pictures anymore but it was 1.5M pictures in early 2016

We focus on IDs and we have:
381 566 IDs (obviously only one is correct per observation, althogh some can be nested - e.g. ID1 = Scarabeidae, ID2 = Scarabus, ID3 = Scarabus capensis)
495 954 agreements of IDs.
And we average about 4 hours to half observations identified (a cheat since lots come in with IDs already), 80% within a day, 90% within a week, 95% within a month - the remaining 5% tend not to be identified for a very long time.

For southern Africa we have observations for
28 749 taxa, of which 21 081 are at species level (the others are to family, tribe or genus or higher rank). So technically over 5 years we have recorded about 10% of our species, over half of plants, most non-fish vertebrates, but are not doing very well in fungi (although alien macrofungi are quite good). A major gap identified is our Lichens - the vast majority of our lichens are not identified beyond being a lichen. Insects are an issue in that in most cases ID beyond generic level requires dissection, although some of our really keen amateurs are showing that this might well be a limitation of previous methodology and that many species can be identified from photographs but existing keys and monographs are not geared to readily allowing this. And of course, contributors need to be trained on what features need to be included in the observations for any particular group - but most contributors are really keen if they get feedback and deliver remarkable results.

But our data collapsed with the bad Sept 2014 update and never really recovered, and this June 2017 update has been even more disastrous. A major restriction in southern Africa is that everyone wants to use apps from their cellphones and iSpot does not allow this. The vast majority of Users are not interested in working from the computer, but live on their cellphones. iSpot is cellphone friendly, but only if you uses the website and the display is quite clunky. Allowing apps will greatly increase data input. SANBI has a whole lot of apps ready to role, but the OU wont allow it at present. The delays in rolling out these apps has seen at least 4 major southern African data recording initiatives dump iSpot and use other platforms, as well as three new Citizen Science sites started up during this period. We estimate about 250-500k observations lost over the last two years as a consequence of this.

(We did have a statistics page with half yearly updates, but the iSpot June 2017 rewrite has abandoned the forums and the data are no longer readily accessible).

iSpot southern Africa has spawned a field guide to Ants - which “would not have been possible without iSpot” - see

Its not just a numbers game, the trustworthiness of the proffered IDs is of paramount importance and with iSpot (at least in southern Africa, I have no 1st hand knowledge of the other communities) one has the greatest confidence because of the experts who ARE THERE, I don’t think (my personal opinion, I have not actually consulted him on the matter recently) Riaan Stals, for example, would agree with @spins - [quote=“spins, post:89, topic:325”]
Nobody wants to risk his/her mental and physical health using a website as inefficient as ispotnature or inaturalist. And certainly no expert ever will. If you want to involve experts, use something that the experts would use themselves
[/quote]

Having spend considerable resources recruiting experts in all iSpot groups for southern Africa I totally disagree with most of what is said here.

The bottom line is:

  • how easy is it to extract the data
  • how easy is it to add or agree to an ID

that is what really matters.
Ultimately though, it is how friendly the site is. iSpot for instance is:

  • Not at all intuitive. So experts have to be trained to use iSpot. The ID system and agreements are unlike anything experts know about, and therefore totally foreign to them. We in s Afr had a forums page devoted to experts using iSpot, but iSpot has seen fit to throw these away. There are also caveats like leaving out authors and dates and selecting items from the dictionary in order that they are not lost, and requesting updates when the dictionary is wrong. All this is totally lost on an expert visiting the site for the first time. That said, once trained, most experts I have recruited are most enthusiastic and helpful (or at least were until a few months ago).
  • Not at all easy for an expert to use. So an expert who looks at a LIST View and sees that all the IDs bar one are correct, cannot just agree to them: s/he has to open each observation in turn and then go to the ID and then click I agree. The expert does not have time for this. They need a quick interface where they can rapidly just click “I agree” without having to open up everythign and work things out. The ones that need more attention they will of course open and explore further, but the easy interface to catch and hook them, and get their input is totally missing. SANBI has requested an “Experts Tool” for iSpot, but no one at the Open University seems to care about experts or any user for that matter.

iSpot has a score for each ID which I call an Expert Equivalent. For southern African data that I provide to experts I provide this score. I dont know why iSPot does not include it on the page. But IDs vary from 0.001 EE to 16 EE. This is a superb way of evaluating confidence in an ID. And for experts, they will want to be able to order the observations from least to most EE, so that they can check those with the least confidence. iSpot can do all this: it is all under the hood, but the programmers are so totally ignorant of what they are doing that all the really strong points of iSpot are totally hidden. I cannot fathom out the logic of whomsoever is running iSpot is using: it is like they are trying to kill the site and make it unusable.

"This Thursday am iSpot will be down for a short while as new modules are uploaded."

It’s late Thursday afternoon. Has the Code been cleverly and ineffectively updated or did you mean a week on Thursday?
But then, thus came "not deployed today and will be put on Monday instead."

Haha, yeah typical iSpot. They promised to have changes back by the 12th at the latest, then plan the update for the 14th, then push it for the 18th. I can only hope that it actually improves the site when it eventually comes…

Where do you get the 12th from?

Ah: - [quote=“Janice A - 7 July 2017 - 6:58PM”]
within the next 6 – 8 weeks
[/quote]

But surely that is the 7th of September, not the 12th?

whoops, seems I calculated it wrong.

So this update is waaay overdue.

Yes but I have yet to meet a programmer who delivers anything on time or who delivers all that was promised …

In any other endeavour it would be deemed unprofessional and result in penalties, but here it appears to be the norm …

Does anyone actually know which company is responsible for this mess?