loading . . . A personal history of iSpot iSpotnature.org lasted 18 years
iSpotnature.org, a pioneer in crowdsourcing the identification of organisms, has closed. The Open University ran the service since its launch in 2008. In that time, the iSpot community of thousands collected 2 million images and helped each other identify over 40,000 species, mainly in the UK and South Africa. Here, I reflect on what we achieved, what was learned and where we failed.
## The birth of iSpot
The idea for iSpot came to me in response to another, earlier decision by the OU to close a long-running course. I went to the OU as a lecturer in biology in 1979 when, among other courses, I worked on S323 Ecology, a pioneering course that unusually for the time taught advanced ecology across taxa (plants, animals, microbes) and sub-disciplines (population ecology, ecosystems, physiological ecology). All students travelled to one of a dozen residential field stations where they did fieldwork for a week, often working 12 hours a day. When they went home, students had to devise, complete and write-up a field project in their local area, testing an hypothesis with appropriate statistics which we taught them. It was full-on and unique in the UK, possibly anywhere. I estimate that at least 10,000 students studied this course before it was closed. By the time this happened, I was Professor of Ecology at the OU, so I took the demise of the course to heart and started to think about what I could do about it.
One reason the powers-that-be (or the _high heid yins_ as they are called in egalitarian Scotland where I now live) thought they could end ecology teaching at the OU was that in 2003 we had launched an interdisciplinary course called _The Environmental Web_. This pioneered the use of web resources and web teaching across ecology, climate and social science. I directed that course and in no way did it make our ecology course redundant, but the high heid yins told me that ecology was an out-of-date subject – “so very 1970s”. A red rag to a bull would be an understatement of my reaction.
My solution was the Biodiversity Observatory and I immediately nabbed the domain name for the university for a modest £15. The idea was to create a bottom-up demand for ecology teaching from our students by building upon the very widespread interest in natural history. Open University students study from home and live throughout the UK, which creates a challenge to teaching but is a gift to natural history. What if you could turn the scattered distribution of students from a handicap into an asset using the web? Or, as a colleague put it, ‘if you’ve got a wooden leg shake it about.’
The other simple but critical insight was how fundamental it is to name species. The correct scientific name for a wildlife observation unlocks everything else: the recording of distribution, the sharing of new knowledge and access to existing information, research of all kinds, conservation action and most important of all from our perspective at that time, learning. The scientific name is a quantum of learning and the first time you are able to put a scientific name to a species is a lightbulb moment for many people.
I started talking to people about this idea and organised a meeting in Milton Keynes to canvas opinion and to build support. One of the people to attend was Gill Stevens, Head of UK Biodiversity at the Natural History Museum in London, and her contribution was pivotal in two unforeseen ways. She talked about how taxonomists used ‘letters of esteem’ from accepted authorities in their field to gain access to the museum’s collections. This was a lightbulb moment for me and from it came the idea that we could create a reputation system that would help us verify identifications made online. iSpot’s reputation system, about which more later, was essential to its acceptance by the community of experts that we recruited to help us. The other way that Gill helped was even more pivotal: She mentioned my name to Linda Davies at Imperial College, who just happened to be an OU graduate and had studied the lost ecology course. Linda phoned me up totally out of the blue and said she was about to submit a £12 million bid for a project called Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) to the Big Lottery Fund, and would I like to participate. The only problem was that the closing date was the end of the week.
Next day I sent Linda a list of 12 projects that would enable us to build the Biodiversity Observatory. It included two new short courses aimed at the general public, the software development of iSpot as an observation tool, its management, research into reputation systems, keys to identification based on Bayesian probability, community building and more. A small proof-of-concept grant was awarded enabling us all to test our ideas, then followed by the full grant to OPAL of £12m over 5 years. Ten of our twelve ideas were funded from the pot and the Biodiversity Observatory was on its way.
Gill and Linda led OPAL from South Kensington, but tragically Gill died in 2011, before the project ended. In 2008, with a Dean of Science who had experienced a Damascene moment, and with funds in hand, I was given a year free of other responsibilities and we could recruit a team. I still hadn’t come up with a name for the platform that would be the heart of the observatory, until ‘iSpot’ popped into my head while I was in the shower. I don’t know if cleanliness is next to godliness, but it does loiter suspiciously around good ideas.
## Achievements
How properly to do justice to an 18-year project that pioneered many things we take for granted today, involved tens of thousands of naturalists and students, collected more than 2 million images and over a million records of wildlife? I left the Open University for a chair at the University of Edinburgh in 2014, and although iSpot continued for another dozen years, my involvement lapsed. The Open University seemed to prefer a clean break and I had much to do in my new job, so this was a mutual separation. It means that I am not the right person to sum-up all of iSpot’s achievements, a task that I am deliberately leaving to others who have more recent knowledge. However, I can give a personal perspective.
The community of wildlife recorders in the UK is brought together under the umbrella of the National Biodiversity Network (NBN). I spoke at the annual NBN conference in London in 2008, before the launch of iSpot. I remember well the scene at the Royal Society lecture room in London where I described to an audience of 200 experts what we were planning to do, and the deathly silence that followed. You could have heard an entomological pin drop. “You can’t identify most species from photographs” was the gist of the response, once I had persuaded these taciturn experts, every one of whom knew more about identification than me, to say what they really thought. Luckily, they were (mostly) wrong, but it is worth remembering that this was an untested matter as recently as 2008.
So, most importantly, iSpot showed that it is possible to crowdsource the identification of organisms, rapidly and efficiently, in a totally open system that includes complete novices.[i] Putting the correct name to an insect or a plant you have just seen is a rewarding experience, but one that beginners lack the confidence to try. As with learning a language, if you are scared of speaking and making a mistake, you cannot progress. We lowered this barrier by allowing observers to say “It might be this.” Our commonest observation was of mallard ducks and identifying even one of these correctly gives a beginning iSpotter a filip. That means they will make more observations and will start to learn. This becomes a habit, even a hobby. I know, because it happened to me. Through iSpot I got into identifying leaf miners.
We discovered iSpot was also habit-forming, even compulsive, for experts. Our main collaborator in South Africa made tens of thousands of observations. In the UK, one or two experts seemed to be ever-present on iSpot, just waiting for observations they could name for people. I recall sitting in a pub in London after an OPAL meeting and telling a friend how remarkable this was. She asked me to show her and I thought, “Oh no! Now it’s not going to work.” A new observation of a butterfly quickly popped up on the iSpot home screen and 20 seconds later it had been correctly named. I noticed that the identifier was one of our most active experts, living in the Scottish Highlands. I still owe him a pint.
iSpot was always about learning, which is what distinguished it from similar websites. We rewarded achievement and encouraged ambition with a reputation system that I believe may be unique, even now. The magic sauce we have in Britain is the thousands of amateur experts, knowledgeable not just in birds (expertise you will find anywhere), but in every obscure group of invertebrates, in all plants, fungi, lichens etc. – you name it (pun intended). We recruited enough of these experts at the start to seed our reputation system. Each of them had a broad taxonomic badge (plants, fungi, birds, insects, amphibians, mammals) and an expert badge for their chosen group. When they confirmed a name suggested by someone else with the qualifier “I’m as sure as I can be”, that person got a small increment in reputation for the taxonomic group. Every username was displayed with badges indicating their earned expertise in each of the taxonomic groups they were active in. You could also earn reputation when non-experts agreed with a name you had suggested, scaled by the number of agreements and the reputations of the agreers.
As data began to accumulate, we exploited it to introduce new functions to aid learning. There was a quiz that you could take to test you ID skills on your own observations, for example. Our original idea was to use this to confirm learning, but what we actually discovered was just how difficult it is to confidently quantify this. The feature I was most proud of was one that displayed ecological links between species, which was funded by the British Ecological Society. We used the phytophagous insects database held by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology to create a look-up table used by the iSpot code. This matched every new, named observation of a plant or an insect with all the species known to eat it, or that it eats. These ecological associates were then shown in a film strip at the bottom of the page, populated with images from our own data. We also let iSpotters report observations of insects and plants that had been seen together, thus generating new data on pollination and herbivory.
Many people were involved in one way or another in setting up and running iSpot and its supporting activities and I can’t name them all, but I must mention the key characters who were essential to its success. Janice Ansine manged the project from its birth in 2008 to its demise in 2026. How she survived the constant stress I do not know, but she did it with brilliant Jamaican good humour. Mike Dodd took a break from Post Doc research in my group to bring his expertise in natural history, photography and much else to iSpot. Richard Greenwood, working in the OU’s Institute of Educational Technology, was our chief software engineer and achieved wonders, fast. He also coded the Evolution Megalab that became the second project under the Biodiversity Observatory banner[ii]. Martin Harvey brought his expertise in insect natural history to the team and plugged us in to the huge, invisible network of amateur experts in natural history with which we are blessed in Britain.
## Lessons learned
When I left the OU in 2014, I was not hopeful that iSpot would survive. This was not simply a case of _après moi, la deluge_. There was no obvious academic lead for the project and the iSpot code was creaking badly, despite at least one complete code change. The site was slow, and had scaled poorly. The website was responsive to screen size, but there was no phone app. Around 2012 we spent quite a bit of money on making one, but we tried to create an all-singing-all-dancing app, rather than something simple. Without the capacity to create the app in-house, we relied on consultants who were not up to the task. Out-sourcing rarely works well in my experience. In hindsight, an app that simply allowed you to quickly upload an observation to iSpot would have been enough to begin with and we could have improved it incrementally. Keep it simple, stupid!
Also, our code base should have been built for scaling-up from the word go. We focussed on adding custom modules to a software framework called Drupal with a MySQL database to support all the specialized functions required by iSpot. Using a database that had strong spatial capabilities such as Postgres rather than MySQL would have been better because location is so important to natural history recording. The choices made were logical at the time, but they weren’t future-proof. I half-realised this early on, but by then we already had a sophisticated system that worked. The future came out of the blue, as I suppose it always does.
In October 2011, I organised a small international conference at the OU funded by the Encyclopaedia of Life (EoL) for biodiversity projects similar to iSpot. Few other countries had anything up and running, but we invited the projects we knew about. From the US this was EoL itself from Harvard and a project called Fieldscope. At the very last minute I got a call from California from Scott Loarie who said he had heard about our meeting and he was working on a project called iNaturalist (iNat). Could he come along? I said ‘sure.’ His presentation at the meeting was slick but my recollection is that the project was still quite small. He showed us iNat responding at lightning speed, drawing real-time maps of observations almost instantly. I asked him how this was achieved and he said that it was coded in a framework called Ruby on Rails as a master’s project by Ken-ichi Ueda. Their main interest (at the time) was to gather research data.
Skip forward three years to 2014 and I was preparing to leave the OU. iSpot was now big, with a sister site for South African data, but our code couldn’t cope with it all and I wasn’t confident that the OU would fund the work required to fix this. In April I was on study leave at UC Davis and took the opportunity to go to see Scott and Ken-ichi at their small office in San Francisco. I floated the idea that we would combine iNat, now growing fast, with iSpot. They were keen on the idea and said iNat code could be badged iSpot in the UK. Back at the OU I put this idea to the high heid yins and was met with a blank refusal to consider any such thing. This could have secured iSpot’s future, but the territoriality of the institution won out.
It is no exaggeration to say that I was distraught, watching from a distance, by how iSpot struggled thereafter. Newly arrived in Edinburgh, I met with John Sawyer, the new director of NBN who it so happened had just moved there too. We met over a curry to discuss using iSpot as a platform for NBN’s citizen science data, but before we could even create a plan, John died suddenly on the island of Mull – a tragic and untimely death. The new Director chose iNat for their platform and it has since done spectacularly well in the UK.
What have I learned personally? Principally two things. Collaboration is usually preferable to competition (in fact I wrote a book about cooperation recently if anyone needs convincing, as I am afraid many people still do[iii]). And good ideas are not enough; you need scalable technology so that your good ideas can fly.
[i] Silvertown, J., et al. (2015), Crowdsourcing the identification of organisms: A case-study of iSpot, _ZooKeys,_ 480, 125–46.
[ii] Worthington, J. P., et al. (2012), Evolution MegaLab: a case-study in citizen science methods, _Methods in Ecology and Evolution,_ 3 (2), 303–09.
[iii] Silvertown, J. (2024), Selfish Genes to Social Beings: A Cooperative History of Life (Oxford University Press). https://jonathansilvertown.com/blog/ispot
