Deleting and then adding observational fields: What happens with underlying data?

General
1

Over the past five years our group has entered tens of thousands of observations into 5 related projects on iNaturalist. We have utilized four observational fields, several of which are problematical. We would like to change various attributes of these fields, but have been stymied by the fact that they were created by others who we cannot contact. So we have decided that the best path forward is to create brand new observational fields and delete the existing problematical fields. Unfortunately, data collection for this season is well underway, and we have concerns. Here’s the hypothetical situation:

– You have a project with an observation field titled “Color”.
– The person who created the field cannot be contacted.
– You have already created 5 observations with values entered for the above field.
– You now realize that the field is ambiguous and you want to change the field’s title to “Head Color”
– However, you have no ability to change the field since the person who created the field cannot be contacted.
– So you create a brand new field (“Head Color”) and delete the existing field from the project.
– Moving forward, you add five new observations to the project, each with values for the “Head Color” field.
– You then download the data from iNaturalist as a CSV file. Here is what I assume the file would look like:

The spreadsheet for all 10 observations will contain both a “Color” column and a “Head Color” column. However, the first five observations will have values for “Color”, but no values for “Head Color”. The opposite will be true for the last five observations.

Could someone please confirm that this is the way iNaturalist will handle this situation in terms of the underlying data structure?

2

Associating non-mandatory observation fields with projects is mainly a way to make it easy to add those fields to observations in the project. The data for the individual observation field entries are linked to the respective observations, not to the project.

Removing an observation field from a project will not affect the observations where the observation field was used – they will still have the original observation field and value.

If only a few observations in your project have the old observation field, it may make sense to add the new observation field to those observations and delete the old one from them so that all observations use a single field for the characteristic you are tracking.

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