Bat Observations including Sound and Spectrograms

[buteobuteo2]

@cthawley

Yes, please don’t add spectrograms as pictures as mentioned above. I’m including the staff response from one of @thomaseverest 's links here since I think it sums up some of the issues well:

@kueda

Observation photos are intended and assumed to be photographic evidence for the recent presence of an organism, i.e. they should communicate what you saw in the field. Not spectrograms, not habitat shots, not pictures of the sky to show what the weather was like, not photos of photos, just actual photos that show someone what you saw, and hopefully look like what others might see when seeing similar evidence for the recent presence of the same taxon. We make that assumption when showing observations photos on the taxon page, when training our computer vision system, when sharing data with partners like GBIF, etc., and all those non-organism shots break that assumption and cause us to use and share inaccurate information (we claim something is a photo of an organism when it’s actually a spectrogram). If at some point we support some way to categorize observation photos or support some other form of ancillary photographic material to be attached to an obs, then that stuff would be ok, but at present we don’t. I realize tracks & signs screw that up and I admit my tolerance for them is a lot higher than it is for spectrograms, but I think that’s b/c they at least show something unique about the organism that helps others learn to recognize it in person (“but what about microscopy” etc etc). Spectrograms are great evidence and really interesting (as are habitat shots, microscopy, most of the other kinds of images that people upload as obs photos), but if we’re not going to distinguish them from photos of organisms then I don’t think people should upload them. Maybe post them elsewhere and embed them in the description or a comment or something.

But the same member of staff makes clear later in the same thread that there is no official iNat policy on excluding spectrograms. The views above appear to be personal ones:

@kueda

I didn’t say it was an official position. It is my opinion. If we on staff thought this was a serious problem we would build tools to support or suppress these kinds of images, or at least include some kind of statement of policy in the FAQ or the Curator’s Guide. I would personally prefer that people not post these kinds of images as observation photos, but currently we don’t have an official position on them.