When I go through local observations I will annotate what I can eg organism, alive, green leaves, flowers etc. The basic very obvious things that you don’t need much knowledge for. But I do ask, does anyone use these? Is there any benefit to me bothering to do so apart from reminding myself I have already looked at that observation?
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Yes. They are used to find or exclude things in a search, like a lot of users do not like to view dead animals, or only want to see butterfly larva, or check the flowers of a certain plant.
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I personally think the larvae annotation is particularly meaningful. At this point, most people understand the significance of milkweed to monarchs but sometimes miss the dependence of, say migrating warblers, on the larvae of multiple insects that might themselves be supported by specific plants. Adding the annotation allows others to mine iNat data to illustrate the significance of planting some plants over others.
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Being able to search for when plants are in flower or fruit is also very useful. If you haven’t noticed, when you’re on a species’ taxon page on iNat, it shows you graphs of when in the year different life stages appear (eg for insects) or when things are flowering or fruiting (for plants). You can specify a location on the taxon page and then these graphs automatically update. It’s a genius feature of iNat and is wholly dependent on people annotating observations with these details.
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the more people add annotations, the more useful annotations become - so thank you!
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I don’t have time to add annotations because I am going through hundreds of observations each day and identifying them all to the best of my ability. I wish that people did just annotate, but that is not common to my knowledge.
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Thanks for pointing that out. I have so far focused my annotations on birds and had not given much thought to other organisms. As I am not an expert in any field, at least I can be of some use by adding annotations.
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For me, annotating a species is very much part of my routine getting-to-know process. The same species of plant (for instance) may look very different at different times of the season. Being able to recognize these differences makes me a better identifier.
A couple of years ago, I started annotating the common witch-hazel in Vermont. What I found was so strange, I ended up annotating all observations in New England just to be sure. The annotation process gave me the confidence I needed to start identifying common witch-hazel.
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I do think there’s a lot of potential benefit to annotating observations, but like many other aspects of iNat identifying, don’t feel obliged to do it beyond the level at which you find it rewarding.
Annotations are used in three main places in the iNat interface. The first is to create the phenology graphs that @jon_sullivan mentioned earlier, so you can answer questions like “When does this plant typically flower?” and “When do leaf buds appear for buckeyes in Ohio?”.
The second is as a filter when using the photo browser, so you can see photos that show flower buds, or insect pupae.
The third (newer) place is the ability to use annotations as a filter when selecting observations to identify. This is helpful in scenarios such as an identifier choosing just to review butterfly larvae for identification.
I’ll note that the way the annotations work on iNat isn’t ideal for a couple of reasons:
- The annotation relates to the observation overall, which may contain multiple photos and multiple individuals—so an observation labelled “Juvenile” and “Male” may also contain adult females, and some photos shown in the browser with the “Juvenile” or “Male” filters selected will therefore show those adult females, too.
- The photo browser filters do not allow combinations of annotations, so you can’t search for “Juvenile and Male”, just one or the other. Similarly, you can’t search for “Flower buds but no open flowers”, which means a user will still need to sift through and interpret observations.
Despite that, as a taxon gets a higher percentage of observations annotated, the usability of the phenology graphs and photo browser filters really improves.
And annotations can be (and have been) used for all sort of research such as tracking leaf-break dates over time.
If you learn the keystrokes needed for particular annotations and navigate between tabs, then adding them takes only a couple seconds, but I’ll also admit that sometimes I just want to add IDs and leave the annotations to someone else!
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Annotations for leafminers are very useful, so folks know it’s the insect eating the leaf rather than the plant itself that is being observed (although ideally it’s both?)
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I think iNat should induce more users to do annotations… Many people don’t use the web page or give much attention to it on iNat app ;-;
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Annotating Evidence of Presence for mammals is very helpful. Very frequently for mammals the photos are of something other than a living organism. These are very easy to annotate too. There are people who specialize in IDing by scat, tracks, etc.
I would greatly appreciate anyone willing to annotate rabbit and hare observations that are scat, tracks, hair, or bone. I’ve been going through hundreds of RG observations to find mistakes and it goes a lot faster when I can search by Evidence of Presence and quickly mark the non-organism observations as reviewed.
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I have definitely used it to exclude dead animals. I know it’s part of nature but sometimes I’m just not in the mood to go through and try to ID those.
I’ve also used the “larva” one for butterflies if I’m trying to ID a caterpillar so I don’t have to scroll through dozens or hundreds of photos of the adults to find a few caterpillar photos.
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Do you happen to have a list of the keystrokes, or know a source where they can be found?
Getting an idea of phenology can aid the identification process.. in spiders it is of course often not easy to see whether they are adult or not.. but e.g. in wolf spiders anyone can see whether a female carries an egg case or spiderlings, indicating a) that the female must be adult and b) when she reproduces… both very helpful information. I use those graphs on the taxon page frequently and appreciate anyone annotating
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When you’re on the Identify modal and go to the Annotations tab, click on the keyboard shortcuts icon in the lower left-hand corner. You’ll see the annotations keyboard shortcuts. See more at Using Identify to Annotate Observations
and
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Start from what you use. I wanted photos of fruit, so I annotate that. Everyone knows a caterpillar … and for identifiers it is a different skill set to the adults. If a plant taxon I know has relatively few obs, I annotate for the phenology graph. Annotate what interests you, or it is no fun. And use the keyboard shortcuts - so much more effective - once you find a good match for you taxon.
Random example https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/590662-Notobubon-galbanum On the taxon page - phenology at Chart - click Flowers and Fruit - click the gear - Add Annotations for Flowers and Fruit. Then it is quick and easy - P L owers = flowers and P R uit = fruit. Rewarded with a useful graph, instead of Hide NO Annotation. That example is over 1K … chose a better one.
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Not necessarily. If I see a proleg, I can be pretty sure it’s either a caterpillar or a sawfly schadon, but to know which, I need a side or bottom view to see whether the first abdominal segment has prolegs (sawfly) or not (lep). Given a top view, I may know only that it’s an insect larva, and as on iNat it has to be identified at least to order to annotate it as larva, I just set an ob to an arbitrary order so that I could annotate it. If it’s a genus or species I know, such as the woolly bear, of course I know what order it is.
Should a cluster of insect eggs be annotated as life stage=egg (and evidence=organism), or evidence=egg (and life stage=adult)?
And I had to remind myself how to pronounce Notobubon.
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I use them because I use the filters and want to help others with that feature as well. When I just go over other people’s obs and seeing if I can improve on them, I usually also add the annotations where I can. I normally also add the observation details to my own observations, for context if for nothing else. It’d be easier if I had a list for tags, but trial and error. Trial and error. 
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I use them all the time so thank you!! Often I want to compare plants without flowers (just leaves) or with colored leaves, fruits, etc. They are super helpful. I try to annotate, but I don’t always do it (I do a lot of IDing). I also annotate scat and tracks on a lot of observations by others so that people who know tracks and scat can search for those observations to hopefully help with IDs.
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