I might also reply on iNat, but:
- I disagree that we don’t want ‘boring’ trees on OSM. London Planes, for instance, can determine the ambience of places (e.g., la Devesa in Girona), and their loss to disease along the Canal du Midi is mourned. Quite besides which it is often much easier to map all trees than to use some arbitrary selection criteria. This becomes even more useful if one returns & some have been felled. I have actually used trees I’ve mapped to locate insects which attack the foliage when there was a very limited number of observations in the UK.
- Mapping trees has multiple purposes: searching for species-specific pathogens (fungal or animal), shade calculations, 3D modelling, calculating CAVAT.
- Various Tree Registers have been documented on the OSM wiki for a number of years. Tree Registers are very useful, but quality, especially identification & how up-to-date they are, can be issues.
- iNat’s insistence that planted species are “Casual” records means that they will not necessarily get validated, so saying that OSM is worse is probably not true for many street & park trees.
- The work of Awo mapping trees in cities in Chile, mainly Valdiva is in my view exemplary.
- See recent thread about trees in Hamburg.
- various blog posts of mine: tree trails, mapping using Obbsmap (an iNat competitor). Note: I dont use the latter approach as position of trees is not good enough, and I suspect the same with iNat, and now I prefer to use a dedicated OSM editor (Vespucci or EveryDoor)
- talk I gave at a TDAG workshop 18 months ago, you have to search to find the entry.