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It's great that citizen science space for collecting ecological or biodiversity data is is growing. I'm curious why the consortium members behind Pl@ntNet are a

It's great that citizen science space for collecting ecological or biodiversity data is is growing. I'm curious why the consortium members behind Pl@ntNet are all French. Compare that to iNaturalist, which features partner organizations in 21 countries. That kind of widespread buy-in is attractive and I'm not sure what is limiting Pl@ntNet: - https://plantnet.org/en/plntnet-consortium/ https://plantnet.org/en/plntnet-consortium/ - https://www.inaturalist.org/sites/network https://www.inaturalist.org/sites/network Personally I've found iNaturalist to be the optimum for me since it partners with 4 major Canadian organizations; it allows for local conservation authorities to have access to location data for vulnerable species observation. It's also every branch of the tree of life, not just plants, so it's allowed me to learn to identify more kinds of species.

nthypes 4y ago
The PlantNet Consortium is mostly made up of French organizations, which may be why it hasn't gained as much traction internationally. However, it's still a valuable resource for plant identification and data collection.
RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
Biggest issue with inaturalist is the extremely limited scope of their api. I'll be checking this one out, but inaturalist is extremely tight fisted with both their data and the service, which is extremely disappointing.There is a wide range of utility that could be built on it's back if it were open source.
- morphle 4y ago
  Sadly, this tendency to keep the data proprietary instead of open is found in almost all projects, ususally because of simple US or European copyright reasons. There are ways around this, for example in other countries the copyrights have expired, the copyrights don't always apply, people can be contacted and asked to waive copyrights and new pictures could be made to replace the copyrighted ones, etc. You can 'quote' much of the copyrighted material. There have been government (over)rulings of copyrights. All that implies work that the citizen scientists can do as well.
pvaldes 4y ago
> It's great that citizen science space for collecting ecological or biodiversity data is is growing. As great as would be having less professional physicians, promoting cheap children soldiers instead professional ones or using trained monkeys to build the brakes of our car and manage the economy The so called "Citizen science" means more amateurs and less professionally trained people really focused in solving real problems that are difficult and complex. Solutions that are required to survive at long term But, yeah, lets assign this task to scholars in their spare time and we will have it for free. In the end what you will have is databases corrupted with fake data. A set of "true scientific facts" for democrats and another set of "true facts" saying exactly the opposite for republicans.
7952 4y ago
My hunch is that Inaturalist gets traction because it is social, which makes it fun, which makes it successful.

nthypes 4y ago

The PlantNet Consortium is mostly made up of French organizations, which may be why it hasn't gained as much traction internationally. However, it's still a valuable resource for plant identification and data collection.

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago

Biggest issue with inaturalist is the extremely limited scope of their api. I'll be checking this one out, but inaturalist is extremely tight fisted with both their data and the service, which is extremely disappointing.There is a wide range of utility that could be built on it's back if it were open source.

morphle 4y ago
Sadly, this tendency to keep the data proprietary instead of open is found in almost all projects, ususally because of simple US or European copyright reasons. There are ways around this, for example in other countries the copyrights have expired, the copyrights don't always apply, people can be contacted and asked to waive copyrights and new pictures could be made to replace the copyrighted ones, etc. You can 'quote' much of the copyrighted material. There have been government (over)rulings of copyrights. All that implies work that the citizen scientists can do as well.

pvaldes 4y ago

> It's great that citizen science space for collecting ecological or biodiversity data is is growing. As great as would be having less professional physicians, promoting cheap children soldiers instead professional ones or using trained monkeys to build the brakes of our car and manage the economy The so called "Citizen science" means more amateurs and less professionally trained people really focused in solving real problems that are difficult and complex. Solutions that are required to survive at long term But, yeah, lets assign this task to scholars in their spare time and we will have it for free. In the end what you will have is databases corrupted with fake data. A set of "true scientific facts" for democrats and another set of "true facts" saying exactly the opposite for republicans.

7952 4y ago

My hunch is that Inaturalist gets traction because it is social, which makes it fun, which makes it successful.