In iNaturalist, an annotation is a specific type of metadata that users can add to an observation to provide additional details beyond the basic information like species, location, and date. For example, life stage, sex, etc.
Every sunday (local time full day):
Try to add your average daily number of annotations + 25.
So if you’ve never annotated before you start with 25.
As extra challenge (for regular annotators), include something new:
Try to add annotations on a taxon that you’ve never annotated before
Try to type of annotations that you never added before
To promote this event, add a tag in the observation #AnnotationSunday or include a link to this forum post (1 x per user)
Annotations can be useful for:
making data more searchable (for identification),
being used for educational purposes,
being used for scientific purposes,
including data in certain iNaturalist projects (for example, North American caterpillars)."
Great idea! I often annotate moths, because the adults look so different from the caterpillars. I also annotate feathers and bones when I come across them, as I think some identifiers specialize just on feathers or just on bones.
Here is a link for doing life stage annotations for moths/butterflies. They are a really easy group to do. Lepidoptera
(this will not include obs you have marked as reviewed or IDed so you may want to check the “reviewed” box and do those first)
Keyboard shortcuts reminder (you have to be on the annotations tab for these to work)
L then A for Adult
L then P for Pupa
L then L for Larva
L then E for Egg
(you don’t have to use capital letters, it just makes it easier to read here on the forum)
If the observation is of a gall, don’t mark a life stage unless the gall has been cut open and you can see what stage it is in. Don’t mark larva for a leafmine unless you can see the caterpillar in the photo. Don’t assume a glued together pile of stuff is around a pupa. Some species built these structures and carry them around when they are a larva/caterpillar.
As far as I know, bagworm moths will carry around their bags/constructions as both larvae and pupae, and they can persist after pupation. I don’t mark life stage on these unless you can see a clear larval head capsule or pupa sticking out. 95% of the time or more you can’t really do life stage on those. Of course, bagworm adults just look like little moths and are easy to identify as adults.
Thanks for the suggestion. I hadn’t realized that extension had been updated to do more than just observation fields.
Edit: I don’t think this will be helpful for annotating plants, but for insects I set it up to annotate alive, organism, and adult with just CTRL + A. Easy to do those keys with my left hand and arrow key with my right without having to move my hands.
Has anyone seen annotations happen automatically? It has happened a couple of times to me in the last day or so. I’ve added an ID to an Unknown, then clicked over to annotations and found one already there. The first time I thought someone else must be adding annotations and did it a split second after I added the ID. The second time I noticed that it was jeanphillipeb who added the annotation, and wondered if it was something he was working on in conjunction with the “Placeholder backup” project. The observation had a placeholder of “scat”, and once I added an animals ID, it was immediately annotated as “Evidence of presence: scat”. Has anyone seen any info about this?
I know they can be added based on observation fields. I’ve never heard anything about placeholders, but maybe. You’re sure it wasn’t just another user adding one while you weren’t paying attention?
OK, I did an experiment. I went to the “Placeholder Backup” project, and chose an observation to ID. This one happened to have a Private location, so it is unlikely someone was annotating it as I looked at it. And this is what I saw BEFORE adding an ID:
So it shows there is 1 annotation, even though as an Unknown it doesn’t have any relevant annotations. You can also see that the placeholder has been added to an Observation Field.
So the 1 Annotation that wasn’t previously visible turns out to be Life Stage Larva, added by jeanphillipeb. So it must be something he is achieving programmatically.
We do this manually via the Placeholder Backup.
Using the project to work thru our chosen slice (mine is Africa). While we are IDing that one, we work thru whatever annotations are useful.
We already have 5.5K obs with the observer’s placeholder text retrieved against iNat deleting it with the first ID.
I would welcome some Out of Africa support there. From the first 20 obs, HALF had IDs which could be added with the small effort of resolving tiny typos, and one was a missing sp to be flagged for curation.
Yesterday I had a Swahili common name, which I have added to iNat for the future.
The only automation by programme is
Adding to the project (showing the pink label)
Adding the relevant text to the new Observation Field - Placeholder Backup.
Automating annotations would go against iNat guidelines?
For the example you showed - you must have overlapped timewise (annotations do not have a timestamp attached ?)
Our project is not for annotations - only for the placeholder info.
We have no mechanism to automate annotations - iNat does not allow machine-generated content, so there would be no point. That annotation has a human name attached to it. For a larva annotation, someone (you) must have IDed as Lepidoptera first.
There is a way to link observation fields with annotations. What this means is that if someone adds a certain observation field with a particular value to an observation, the corresponding annotation is also filled out. One benefit to this is that it allows users to annotate observations while uploading instead of doing so afterwards.
It seems like what you are seeing is a linked observation field that has mapped the observation field value “caterpillar” to the annotation “life stage: larva”.
The catch is that not all annotations apply to all taxa (ferns don’t have flowers, fish don’t have larvae). Therefore, if one of the linked observation fields is used, it can only add an annotation if the observation has been ID’d as a taxon for which the annotation exists. So as long as an observation is ID’d as “unknown”, the observation field cannot populate the annotation for “life stage: larva” – but it can do so as soon as a relevant ID has been added (lepidoptera, coleoptera etc.).
(I tried to search the forum for a list of these fields or an explanation of the feature, but was not successful. I had assumed that linking observation fields to annotations was something only staff could do, but apparently it merely requires someone with the relevant programming skills.)
It does seem to me that the use of linked observation fields in this project is potentially a bit problematic – if the user who entered the observation was incorrect (say, the “caterpillar” was not actually a lepidopteran larva but a pupa or adult of a taxon with a larval stage), it then becomes difficult to correct the annotation because annotations cannot be changed by anyone other than the observer or the annotater (here a person who is using a program to capture placeholders and convert them into annotations).
Thanks for that. I have found with a bit more exploration that it doesn’t work if the observer has a spelling mistake eg “caterpilla”. But it works occasionally - there are some annotations present which won’t actually appear until an ID is added.
Just for clarity. The placeholder project is not doing this. Nor is it intended to.
@vireya somewhere is a misunderstanding. An Unknown obs does not allow annotation. First someone has to ID, only then do the potential annotations appear.
It clearly is doing this, whether intended or not, because it is adding observation fields to observations. In some cases, these are being automatically converted into annotations.
