Sometimes, an observer will upload one or more landscape photos, and clearly states that the photo(s) are there to document a particular landscape (landscape or vegetation type). In other words, they have no intent that the photo be identified for any particular organism.
I’m strongly hesitant to just ID something in the photo and move on when the person didn’t intend that result. But, then the “Unknown” observation just sits there, unlabeled for someone else to have to figure out. And, yes, a comment to the observer that landscape photos aren’t intended for iNat can be done, but in my short time dealing with Unknowns, I rarely get a response. Thus, again, the photos sit in limbo.
We don’t have a multispecies/landscape DQA (this has been discussed separately, I’m just noting here that we don’t have it), so what do folks do with these observations?
Technically, they have value, but they don’t fit within the iNat framework or system, which requires ID’g an organism, not a landscape or land cover type.
A corollary of this problem is when people upload “nature” sounds (like water), although usually I can deal with that with a “no evidence of organism” DQA, or assign something like birds or crickets to it.
If there are a bunch of plants in the picture, I ID as Vascular Plants, vote “it’s as good as it can be”, and to casual it goes.
If the picture primarily focuses on human-made things or has humans as the main thing to be noticed (buildings, statues, a portrait, a park with kids playing, an audio of a conversation with no bugs or birds in the bg, etc), I ID as human and to casual it goes.
If it’s a patch of nothingness with no organisms in sight (sand and ocean, a mountain, an audio of water running, etc), no evidence of organism.
In edge cases where there’s maybe something I’m not seeing, or the user ID’d something that makes me think the uploaded the wrong picture, an audio is too quiet or low quality, etc, I ask.
Of course all of that is while leaving a comment to the user as well, but as you may already know there are a lot of users that simply don’t respond and continue uploading non-observations, or that batch-uploaded landscapes in which case I leave the message once or twice and just go through the rest directly.
This has been discussed separately in the forum, but that DQA is not for this situation. It is only for when a person has uploaded more than one photo, and each photo is of a different organism. We do not have a DQA for this situation.
we do, it’s “ID is as good as can be” (once the community ID is at something like the common ancestor for the prominent species in the photo, e.g. vascular plants)
it may also be worth leaving a comment along the lines of “observations are supposed to be for a single species at a time” to nudge them in the right direction, but of course theres no guarantee they will see this…
Interesting. I guess I’ve been using it wrong. Given that in the situation under discussion here, there is no single organism to which the evidence pertains, why should we not use that DQA for this?
So again, this goes back to my original issue. We have situations where pushing it beyond kingdom to some level is fine bc the observer didn’t specify.
Here the observer doesn’t want anything but the photo to exist as landscape. I assume what folks are saying is - it doesn’t matter, treat them the same.
Kind of speculating but I think the situation the OP is describing (a poster explicitly saying their observation is not for any particualr species) is quite rare, and they didn’t want people misusing it on observations where a single species is actually the focus. I remember seeing people checking it on mixed species flocks even though there was a clearly intended focus on a single individual that could be easily inferred from the initial ID.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean here but I think we might be in agreement? I think if an observer posts a landscape and doesn’t specify what they want IDed a nice thing would be to ID some species in that photo. But if they explicitly tell you they don’t want any species IDed it seems reasonable to respect that wish and leave your ID at kingdom or what have you.
We have many discussions across the forum. Before, during and after the DQA for Not A Single Subject. Your obs has 3 pictures - bunny, badger and bat = Not a single subject. Bunny, badger and bat are posing for a family photo - presuming they chose the best photo, the DQA is greyed out. Any iNat photo of nature, unless it is a posed studio portrait, contains various biodiversity. Observer or identifier chooses ‘one of them’.
I am reading it more like this: Observer states “photo showing bog habitat” or “photo showing mesic woods” in the notes. Even IDing to kingdom level is going against their intention of recording the habitat as a whole, and we are supposed to respect the observer’s intention.
It’s frustrating that there’s no way for identifiers to make such observations casual without either misusing something in the DQA, or going against the observer by identifying something in it first. So it will forever sit there wasting the time of one identifier after another.
That said, I think I’ve only personally seen one such observation where the intent was so clearly stated. I’ve seen many more where it’s just a landscape with no notes.
This feels like a non-issue to me, though. Why would it be preferable to the observer for the observation’s ID to be “Unknown” rather than, say, “Vascular Plants”, if it’s a landscape photo that they aren’t trying to ID anything in? It’s not like they’re cataloging the photo in some specific way, they’re just uploading a landscape photo to iNaturalist (which is not something that iNaturalist is meant for in the first place.) If the intent was for it to be a landscape photo, I think it makes sense to treat it as a blank slate and just put the ID on it that makes sense and mark it as “as good as it can be.”
You may be right. I was just sort of restating what I believed the OP’s hesitation to be about. (I may or may not be correct.)
I actually have no opinion one way or the other on whether that’s “okay” to do or not. It seems mildly against guidelines, but also harmless and probably the best way to get them out of the way.
I would distinguish between ‘beautiful scenery’ landscape - not the focus of iNat = Casual and no thank you.
And various scientists who are deliberately using iNat for vegetation mapping. A broader focus than iNat’s What sp ? But reasonable to want a way to record that info. With a (new) landscape DQA.
Would it be helpful if inaturalist made it easier for people to upload habitat / landscape photos into the project journal and that could then be promoted as a place for people to put none id pictures ?
If we can upload cats, dogs and potted plants as Casual. I don’t see why a wide view of vegetation / habitat should not be a valid obs. Not RG to sp, but still useful info to that circle of observers. They need the date and location data, not ‘pretty picture’ storage.
ah , so you can use an inaturalist project to record habitat types / condition and not need identifiers . altho maybe i guess not how inaturalist intended it to be used.
would having a separate search box for habitat / landscape pictures { as with species } be going too far .
Accounts that are using iNat for recording habitats or something may have their account suspended the content may be removed. Better to use https://www.anecdata.org/ or other mapping tools.
