iRecord for UK wildlife images?

#1

Hi all,

I’m completely new to this but I have been aware of EOL as a fantastic resource for a while. I have just been browsing UK wildlife and I notice that you have lots of iNaturalist media imported but nothing from the iRecord database which is much more popular in the UK. The images submitted with iRecord records have also been validated by experts (if anything to a higher standard!) and could be really useful for adding media right down to the most obscure families. Has anyone looked into being able to use this data on EOL?

Also, a minor suggestion but for Coleoptera in europe, a huge and complex taxonomic grouping, Udo Schmidt has fantastic photos which I am glad to see have been integrated with EOL. Because of their quality I would suggest that these were set by default as the profile image for all species photographed by him if that were possible as individual curators are unlikely attend many of these pages.

#2

As an aside, is there anything that I could help with in terms of curation considering I have no programming/coding experience?

#3

Thanks for checking, @ewanparry ,

All images in eol.org must be available for re-use under a Creative Commons license, or in the public domain. An increasing array of online image collections meet this requirement, but I believe iRecord does not. We stand ready to include their collection if this changes!

Jen

#4

Oh, also, regarding curation- this is a changing area for us right now, especially for images. We had manual curation of image galleries in an older version of EOL, and a dedicated but very small group of volunteers grooming our galleries to ensure the best available images- like Udo Schmidt’s lovely insect portraits- showed up front. There is still a basic tool in the interface for logged in users to do this. However, this activity was never popular, so we are planning to use the historic judgement of our early image curators as a test dataset to train an AI to perform the same task. It just seems more scalable to manage 2,000,000 image galleries this way.

One of the best ways for naturalists to help EOL and other biodiversity data hubs is of course in working in, supporting and alerting us to high quality wildlife image collections, especially for groups where our coverage is weak. I don’t want to discourage support for iRecord. It is an important pipeline to UK scientists already, and if our licensing incompatibility resolves in the future, we’ll be happy to provide another use case.

One place we still rely on humans within the EOL platform is in translation. Bilingual volunteers are very welcome to join us on https://translatewiki.net/ to help visitors from around the world to navigate the site in their own language.

Jen