“iNaturalist Australia” Launched
The Atlas of Living Australia has launched the "iNaturalist Australia" website.
See the "Announcement on the iNaturalist Blog" and "blog post on ALA"
At present observations can still be "uploaded to ALA through their Record a Sighting tool" but this will be phased out in favour of uploading observations through the iNaturalist platform.
Observation from iNaturalist are synced with ALA but the details on frequency of syncing, refreshing of records and which observations were synced have been a little unclear. The process has been explained by ALA HERE, and is worth quoting in full below:
Data is harvested from iNaturalist Australia to ALA daily. After processing, it is refreshed once per week.
Observations will come across to the ALA if they are:
Shareable under a Creative Commons license
In Australia
Verifiable observations - those which are marked Needs ID or Research Grade
If an iNaturalist observation is updated with a new identification, image, or a changed location, the record in ALA will be updated as part of the regular data harvest.
If records are removed from iNaturalist, they will be removed from ALA.
So which site should you use? This iNaturalist Blog post explains most of the differences with comments from some ALA staff.
By making iNaturalist Australia your "iNaturalist Network Affiliation", ALA will be given access to the location data of your obscured observations. This will provide those using the ALA data for research and conservation efforts with more valuable information. To make this change, head to your iNat User Profile and select "Edit Account Settings and Profile". Scroll to the bottom of the settings page and change your "iNaturalist Network Affiliation" to "iNaturalistAU"