Platform(s): All Description of need: Audio-only observations often remain stuck in ‘unknown’, due to a limited amount of audio identifiers as well as the issues with audio workflow highlighted by @taitsougstad . However, as far as I have seen and can reason, audio recordings are always of animal s…

Some plants and fungi do make distinctive sounds.

It’s rare, but I have heard a couple of observations with audio recordings of plants, capturing the sounds of pods exploding to release seeds or the distinctive rattle of dry fruit with seeds. Both of those also included pictures, though.

You can definitely do audio observations of plants.

Good point overall. While there are edge cases like plant sounds, the vast majority of audio-only observations are animals, and defaulting them to Animalia would probably reduce a lot of friction and “unknown” backlog. Maybe an optional prompt or soft default (with an easy override) could balance ac…

Can you not set a filter for audio obs ? I Mark as Reviewed and keep moving along.

This seems like more of a problem of limited audio IDers. It is easy to filter a search for Unknown and audio files. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?iconic_taxa=unknown&sounds=true&place_id=any

Seems… unnecessary. Are people identifying audio by filtering “audio only, animals only?” Or are people who identify unknowns sick of identifying audio? Whether it’s left unknown or specified to a kingdom doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference for quality in most cases and it doesn’t seem like it …

Since relatively few people search for “Unknowns” and people searching for animal observations just wouldn’t, this proposal might be useful. I think we’d probably be able to correct the few plants that have audio files pretty easily. Not a high priority for me, but low priority on the positive sid…

I haven’t tried to upload a recording so I don’t know. However, with all the info on iNat, is it possible for the site/app to make suggestions as it does with images? Merlin as able to ID calls. Why not iNat?

Merlin technically trains on the spectrogram images of the recordings rather than the audio itself. This works with the eBird/Macaulay Library audio database because a spectrogram is automatically generated for all uploaded audio. iNat currently doesn’t produce spectrogram images so CV training on t…

Audio-only observations should default to 'animals'

Feature Requests

phma January 30, 2026, 5:27pm 10

I’ve seen/heard an ob of a plant, the sound being the seed rattling in the capsule.

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Unrelated audio on observations of "silent" taxa General	14	335	May 31, 2026
Audio recordings of bird song/calls General	54	4841	May 9, 2023
How do you review/identify audio observations? General	19	556	August 14, 2025
Appropriate Non-animal sound recordings on iNat General sounds , guidelines	23	1366	December 16, 2022
Habitat shots acceptable with audio observations? General	75	2808	December 1, 2021

Audio-only observations should default to 'animals'

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