This is something I’ve noticed while weeding through the casual, dead observations of birds and mammals on iNat. Especially with pets, I’ve seen people who weren’t the original observer annotate a live pet bird, for example, as dead. I discounted it to new users not knowing how annotations work, but there are at least a hundred or so of these observations I’ve seen.
I’m curious to see if anyone else has noticed this, or if anyone has any idea why so many people seem to be annotating these live animals as Dead. It doesn’t matter too much, since this seems to be an issue with just casual observations, but it is something I keep thinking about.
Plants have a lot of wrong annotations too. Often, flowering plants are annotated as “fruit”. For me, it seams that is not allways clear, for what annotations can be used. Or the botanical definition is not clear for all users. I don’t know.
Best to tag them and politely ask. When I’ve done this for odd annotations, it was because they were made accidentally and they hadn’t realised (e.g., maybe someone hit a keyboard shortcut without intending to)
In older observations, if the annotater was the observer they might perhaps, misunderstanding the purpose of the annotation, be recording a later death? Eg of a pet. So care would need to be taken in wording the query.
