One thing which would be really nice is to see where a taxon has been searched for but not found. I haven’t tried it, but I’m betting it won’t work like this as things are, but what we need is to be able to put a 0 (zero) into the observation field ‘count’ and have that observation shown on the taxo…

Please give https://www.inaturalist.org/trips a look. It was designed to enable recording presence/absence data

looks like trips might not work well with (auto-)obscured observations, which i suppose is good and bad

@tiwane I didn’t open the request! Someone else split it off from another thread in which it was considered to be “off-topic”!

The simplest solution is the best. We have an observation field ‘count’. There is no reason not to enter 0 into that field, except that we don’t want the obs to show on the map in the same form as a >0 count.

Ah OK. Will I’ll change the subject.

Hi, I would have liked something like this earlier this year. I went to check on these/see them again a year later, and there was no sign of them, at all, which seemed very odd, as the second visit was only ten days later in the season. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/10427211

That is too much of a hack! The key point is having to have obs with no IDs, so they don’t show on the taxon map of the species concerned! So, it is not “better”. On the subject of effort quantification, it is no more of an issue for count=0 than for count=anything else! Count =1, for example, mean…

[image] stephen_thorpe: That is too much of a hack! well, any attempt to capture absence data in the current system is going to be a hack one way or the other. if i were a developer trying to implement something to capture absence data in the system (other than trips), i would not do it in th…

Maybe, but are absence vs presence really ‘very different’? I don’t think so, which is what I was trying to explain. A zero in the count field is perfectly in line with what a count field is designed for, I suggest. Absence will always be trumped by presence, so if someone else looks harder and find…

One problem with the zero count thing is it’s attached to one point and there are literally a million things that might be absent. I could make 50 observations of elephants around my house and make count = 0 but it doesn’t tell you where I looked or whether I did a full species inventory etc. I real…

Allow users to record absence data

Feature Requests

pisum May 8, 2019, 2:07pm 22

well, if you’re going to use observation fields for now, i think i like some of the other ways people are handing absence data a little better. see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/observations-of-absence-vs-presence/1298/13.

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Allow users to record absence data

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