New here so still figuring things out. After some 250 observations, it seems like I’m the only one interested in clicking on the annotations: adult/juvenile, male/female, alive/dead, etc. These seem important and useful for people doing research and for general learning, but they seem largely ignor…

For clarity, this is what the site defines as an observation, taken from the help file ’ An observation records an encounter with an individual organism at a particular time and location.’ The wildcard is how you define ‘inividual organism’. It is usually taken, and site employees reference it as …

I sometimes ID & annotate at the same time, sometimes I’ll just ID and sometimes I’ll just annotate. For annotations it’s possible to annotate things that I can’t identify. For example for moths - it’s obvious if it’s a caterpillar even if I’ve no idea what species it is, one advantage is that it he…

If adding annotations on the app is added, please consider making it something you can disable. I suspect one of the reasons it is not present is that the list of annotations, as well as the values within them for selection vary depending on the taxa. Thus they cant be prepared until an id is enter…

I also wish there was an option for ‘both’ or ‘mating’, as I seem to catch couples in the act quite often!

Yeah, for the most part it’s easy to annotate lepidopteran lifestage even if they’re not familiar species. That’s useful for downstream identification, since an identifier will presumably be using different resources for caterpillars vs. adults, and being able to filter on annotation makes it easier…

I know it’s not the same as annotating, but there are a few projects for mating: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mating-in-wild https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mating-behaviour You could track yours in there, as well as with observation fields.

I do not do it because to me it seem simplistic, and it does not apply to groups of two or more individuals, in tracks or traces. I think it applies in only a small number of vertebrates, and in some good observations. Despite it have some importance mentioning what is a male or female, what is the …

[image] cmcheatle: The wildcard is how you define ‘inividual organism’. It is usually taken, and site employees reference it as such whenever this comes up to mean a single entity. However, I guess it is possible to interpret that wording as a single taxa. That’s exactly where I’d like to see…

It can help some people with data sorting. E.g. there was an iNat blog post re: a researcher who used iNat observations as a source for looking at wing coloration differences in male Blue Dasher dragonflies in different temperature zones. It didn’t say if he used the male annotation to help filter…

Annotations: Male/female, etc.—How to get more action?

General

zabdiel September 14, 2020, 2:01pm 22

There’s a good tutorial on Using Identify to Annotate Observations and I created a wiki to collate Community Annotation & Observation Field Challenges.

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Annotations: Male/female, etc.—How to get more action?

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