Often, identifiers or researchers on iNat are specifically interested in Land, Marine or Freshwater taxa, as well as specific taxonomical groups.
How can we classify our existing and future observations by habitat, efficiently?
I have a few ideas below, and I’d like to hear what you guys think would be the most efficient and useful for this purpose:
・Using a Traditional project (adding observations manually- using bulk edit)
・Adding Observation field manually Collection project
・Making a collection project by filtering in marine-specific taxa and filtering out non-marine taxa
・Using Tag Explore
・Noting the habitat in the Description Explore
A problem is that the borders between Marine, Freshwater, Land are sometimes unclear. However I think that this can be solved by classifying those observations in both habitats.
Based on eight core attributes, it is possible to classify habitats at a seascape to habitat scale (1:50,000 to 1:25,000 or below)
I’ve added the following attributes as observation fields and am populating these fields for all of my observations. Fields are:
Benthic_depth
Tidal_inundation
Substrate_consolidation
Substrate_composition
Sediment_texture
Energy_magnitude_wave
Terrain_morphology
Structural_macrobiota
Based on combinations of these attributes, 92 habitat types were classified in Central Queensland. Optionally these attributes can be lumped or split, or additional relevant attributes from the Scheme added.
I live in a region that was excellent habitat mapping GIS data (polygon & raster) available. I can export any observation set I desire as GIS point data, throw the habitat mapping under it and from there its a simple process to map the habitat any point is in to a data field in the point data. I’m not sure if there any way to bulk upload back to iNat from there though.
Collection project