As inspiration on IdentityFriday: Wouldn’t it be nice to have an AnnotationSunday? 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,…

I annotate flowering plants - if I want to know when to expect bud - flower - fruit - someone has to annotate for the phenology graphs.

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.

Birds from Southern Africa have hardly any annotations - would be good to have females, adults etc. SA Dragonflies usually also don’t have annotations and it would help to ID females and tenerals SA butterflies have often adult/larva, but rarely female/male which can help to ID such taxa as Coloti…

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 …

AnnoSunday? Or AnnoTuesday, so a letter would overlap?

Great tips. 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 lif…

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 …

Thanks for giving me the motivation to get back on one of my personal projects - annotating all of my own observations!

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 af…

Annotation Sunday

General

rogue_biologist September 11, 2024, 7:56pm 7

Not sure if you’ve seen this yet, but if you like doing annotations this browser extension Adam developed is an absolute game changer. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/announcing-the-universal-metadata-tool-beta/53182

Topic		Replies	Views
Adding annotations - does anyone use them? General	91	2193	March 25, 2026
Annotations: Male/female, etc.—How to get more action? General question	75	4109	December 19, 2020
Add annotations when creating observations Feature Requests web , mobile-app	26	5811	November 11, 2025
Annotations - happy to help General	85	1671	May 6, 2026
Let's Talk Annotations General	939	56872	May 17, 2026

Annotation Sunday

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