Observations with iNaturalist in ethnobotany

In an earlier class I had attempted to introduce iNaturalist via having the students make identifications of common and easily identified plants (think coconut palm, the only species in Cocos). As not all of my students have smartphones (nor digital cameras for that matter), I felt that starting in a computer laboratory doing identifications would let all of the students participate. As I set up the class I learned that accounts with zero observations were more likely to be flagged as spam accounts by the anti-spam system in use. I now consider that the students have to start with observations and hope to rearrange for that in the spring term.

The goal for today was to have those students who had smartphones go out and make an observation or two and then return to the laboratory to annotate the observation and add observation fields. This agenda would prove overly ambitious. As some students did not have smartphones, they were instructed to simply tag along with students who have smartphones.

Few students had the app on their phone, some had no space for the app. Out in the field many students ran into a variety of technical difficulties. Photos not uploading, locations not being logged by the app. The spotty coverage of the college wifi across the campus grounds added to the complications in the field. In retrospect, rather than sending the students out in different directions with the hope of identifying different wild plants, perhaps the first observation should be done within a small area so that I can provide more direct assistance to the students.

I am continually reminded that while my students use smartphones, their ability to explore and successfully new apps is actually quite limited. As one student said of another student, "They only know how to open FaceBook." To some extent this seems to be true. Beyond FaceBook and Instagram the students run into complications. Some did not know the term SIM card, others did not understand how to turn on their GPS and location systems.

Some specific issues I ran into in the field were one phone which did not use the iNaturalist camera but rather dropped out of iNaturalist and into the phone's own camera app. There was not a clear way to then save the image back to iNaturalist except to return to iNaturalist and import the image from the gallery. Other students seemed to have log in difficulties of one sort or another, possibly related sharing their phone with another student and trying to log one person out and log another person in. This was likely complicated by wifi issues in the field.

This one Sphagneticola trilobata plant would become the focus of some of the troubleshooting in the field. 

The class ran well past the allotted time period as I worked with students and phones one-on-one troubleshooting issues.

A future iteration should do this earlier in the term and focus only on obtaining one observation in an area with wifi coverage and close support from the instructor to troubleshoot tech issues as they arise. Class could start in the computer laboratory to cover observation guidelines and process. Then the rest of the period might be spent outside ensuring students with tech are able to make an observation.

Then a second day could be spent in the laboratory having the students check to see if their observation has a location and date, cross-checking any identifications. Annotations and observation fields could be added at that time. Then a later class could look solely at the identify took in the desktop version of iNaturalist.