14. Observation fields in iNaturalist zijn te vergelijken met "Tags" waarbij veel velden hetzelfde doel dienen

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/trips-feature-on-inat/3061/10
The basic back end of trips was added to iNat back in 2014 to support this app 8 was built by a third party developer on the iNat back end with a very small grant from BHL. The basic idea was for the app to show you nearby historic GBIF points, for you to try to relocate them and record presence with a new iNat obs, and to store absences in this trips structure. The app never really worked either because it didn’t have the funding to properly build/support it and/or it was just poorly conceived. The app is not maintained and no longer works but I think all of the older trips cmcheatle mentioned aside from a few us on the team made for testing are from this app. The website also had the basic web UI for trips stubbed out since 2014 but because the tool was only there to support the biocaching app, we didn’t put too much thought into it being user facing.

This year, our Citizen Science colleagues at the California Academy of Sciences has a ‘UBIF’ collaboration with land managers that are interested in developing this work a bit further. Their interest is in the presence/absence of surrogate species to better understand how their managing habitat - e.g. whether this habitat in the San Francisco Presidio has California Man-root which could be a surrogate for the ecosystem they’re trying to manage for https://www.inaturalist.org/trips/24446-ubif-lobos-creek-oak-woodland-plants-1-23-2019 3

Internally, we’re also interested in better understanding/modeling species distributions on the site to improve iNaturalist as both a species identification tool and conservation tool (understanding species distributions is important for both of this). I don’t think we know exactly where we’re going with this yet but we’ve been doing a little bit of work modeling distributions from iNat data and validating it with eBird presence/absence data and its possible that having access to presence/absence data for non-bird data may help validate and improve these models. Here’s a paper I like from a colleague at Berkeley
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-210X.12242 3
and some of the cool work folks are doing at eBird
https://ebird.org/science/status-and-trends/ 1
if you want to get a sense for the general distribution modeling arena we’re exploring

Back to the trips feature - ( a ) the UBIF collaboration, ( b ) our interest in understanding/modeling/validating distributions, and ( c ) vague but persistent interest in this area fro the iNat community were behind the recent updates to the trips feature - which mainly entailed revamping what was there in 2014, creating the infrastructure for rendering out a presence/absence table from trips and accompanying observations https://www.inaturalist.org/trips/tabulate?taxon_id]=36204 1, better documentation, and some rounds of user testing with the UBIF collaborators. We didn’t publicize the updates because (a) its been a busy time of year with Spring, CNC, Seek updates, and other things we’ve been involved in and (b) we’re still trying to get a handle on use-cases for this kind tool and how it does or does not fit into the iNat universe.

An important thing to note about trips which is relevant to some of the forum threads, is that we’re generating presence absence data from plain ol’ observations and the context that trips provide around them rather than collecting a whole new parallel type of presence/absence data. This is appealing because it means we can explore the utility of this kind of data and data use without building and having to maintain a parallel system more or less unrelated to the core of iNat (obs and identifications) - think Guides which is a good example of what we don’t want to repeat. Its also cool because from a presence absence standpoint you can exactly mimic eBird checklists with trips - its not the most pleasant user experience to do so, but its possible to store and render out the exact same data formats. Notice I said presence/absence not abundance as a major caveat is that eBird checklists accomodate counts and trips accomodate presence/absence only.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/trips-feature-on-inat/3061/10