I posted an observation of a bear with two cubs. A user marked the Evidence related to a single subject as No, thereby making my observation Casual.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/292541941
I’ve read the FAQs and the previous forum question and I am unclear on how Evidence related to a single subject is supposed to be used in this situation. Could the community please clarify? Thanks.
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What you describe is a misuse of that DQA. This was intended for observations that have a photo of a bear, then a photo of a pine tree, then one of a dandelion, etc. Vote against that and call friends to vote against it if you need to.
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I link to the iNat blog post when I use this DQA
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000171680-what-do-i-do-if-the-observation-has-multiple-photos-depicting-different-species-
A bear with 2 cubs is applying ‘single subject’ to almost any obs photo on iNat. Unless it is an insect in a studio setting with a blank background - there are always multiple subjects in a photo of nature. THAT is, in so many words in the guidelines, NOT what this DQA is for!
@jmclatchie have you deleted a second picture there? The option should be greyed out if there are not multiple pictures. Bug Reports
??
Should be greyed out as here https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/292980887
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Some people may misunderstand how this DQA item is intended to be used. I’ve had that happen to one of my observations where I had combined several individuals from the same plant population into one observation with an accuracy circle covering the entire population. I added a comment with a link to a previous discussion and it was reversed.
For your observation of the bears, you have adult and juveniles so you could duplicate the observation for annotations, e.g. have one annotated as adult for the mom and another annotated as juvenile for the cubs. If you do that, I strongly recommend adding comments pointing out the different annotations and maybe even linking the two observations so identifiers understand it is not an accidental duplicate but to account for multiple life stages. Otherwise you may get someone misusing DQA again to make the duplicate casual.
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Is there a way to find observations that have been relegated to casual in this way?
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Other than looking carefully through the casual pool, I don’t think there is a way to search for these as there is no consistent way which DQA item people may use. I’ve seen a range of things from marking “not wild” to “no evidence of organism” to bumping the ID up with a disagreement to “Life” and marking it “as good as it can be.” To be fair, I don’t see a lot of these so it doesn’t seem to be a big problem but because they are hard to find I may underestimate how often it happens.
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I find a few when I go thru Needs ID.
Why is that obs Casual? Looks OK. And I go thru DQA, and the good enough question tucked at the bottom of the list.
Every now and then I look through my own observations that are “Casual” to see if are marked that way that shouldn’t be. Checking all the Casual observations be beyond me, though.
Thanks for your response. No, there was never a second picture. I only managed one shot before the bear family moved away.
Then I would call this a Bug. Something is broken here.
I agree that this should be a bug report. If there was only ever one photo, it shouldn’t be possible to vote for the single subject DQA. The observation was uploaded well after the change was implemented to make that DQA only accessible only if there is >1 photo.
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