Dead/Alive Annotation & Its Purpose

[diego_amazonia]

I assumed the dead/alive field was mainly used to correctly assess the natural history of the animal. For example, there are graphs of species dynamics such as seasonality. If say you find the corpse of a migratory bird that’s not supposed to be in the area on that date, marking it as dead will fix the outlier in seasonality. Another example, if you find a dead nocturnal animal, or a footprint of one, at noon, then marking it as dead or as “cannot be determined” would solve the problem if you’re interested in the species’ activity pattern.