Are drawings evidence?

[giannamaria]

I think that drawings should count as evidence, so I’ll do my best to explain when I think drawings could be uploaded:

@Jarronevsbaru

If users can take the time to draw an organism, why not use the same time and effort to photograph it?

In some cases, people see an organism but are unable to photograph it as it was too fast/far away/etc. I think that these sightings should be documented, and so if the user is able to do a decent sketch of the organism, and possibly note certain features, I think a drawing would be acceptable as long as it clearly shows what it is.

@Jarronevsbaru

Only the other day I encountered a problematic observation. It was a doodle of an amphipod, which barely resembled the actual organism. The drawing was so abstract, a simple circle with four lines. It provided little to no useful information about the species. While I marked this observation as casual, the poster disagreed and unmarked it, claiming that sketches are acceptable evidence on iNaturalist.

So for this one, I’d mark this as having no evidence: There’s no patterns, unique shapes, or anything else that can tell us even what family this species is in, much less genus or species.

@Jarronevsbaru

the current authorization of drawings as valid evidence creates ambiguity and opens the door to unreliable observations and therefore unreliable identifications. This is especially concerning in research grade observations, where accuracy should be important. If you think about it almost anything can be treated as “evidence”, but not all evidence is good evidence.

That being said, with the rise of photo quality in AI, we soon may be able to present the same arguement to photos.

Overall, I think people should only upload a drawing if it’s better than or equal to a photo. A drawing like this would be well done, accurate in color and shape, display the organism in a way that shows all field marks, and comes with a written description of the organism’s appearance in the ‘Notes’ section.