This was not my first time using iNaturalist. I have used it several times before on hikes in my hometown and at places like Mt. Mansfield. I personally think it is a very helpful tool for attempting to identify plant and animal species that are not easily identified by amateur naturalists. However, I did not enjoy my experience with iNaturalist for the city nature challenge. Part of it is my fault. I did not get the memo that you had to submit photo of audio evidence of the species you were seeing. So, I set out on a bird walk to try and get as many species as I could for the group. I am a bit spoiled with my use of eBird, which I consider to be one of the most user friendly citizen science websites I know of. I am able to checklists and all of my data is kept in easy to reach places and presented in cool metrics and comparisons. I finished the bird walk and went to submit the species I saw as well as a few plants I took pictures of. When I went to submit it would never show up in the class collection. I got confused about the dates in which the program runs from Walt’s email and was trying to submit things a day late. The main problem I have with the city nature challenge is the fact that everything has to have an audio or a recording. I had well over 25 species of birds that I was ready to submit but I wasn’t able to count them. I feel like for a citizen science project they would want every possible species they could get and the limit of having to have photo or audio drastically lowers who can participate fully and the amount of species that can be counted.
With all this being said, I will still use the app in the future. I have a running tally of the bird species I have seen but it would be nice to extend that to plants, insects, herptiles, and others.