I know many people in this thread will be happy to see that there’s (finally!) a new Data Quality Assessment for marking multi-species observations. I’ve copied the relevant part of this blog post below:
New Data Quality Assessment condition for photos unrelated to a single subject
We also made one change to iNaturalist functionality in response to findings from the study. We added a new “Evidence related to a single subject” condition to the Data Quality Assessment table to make it easier to remove observations with multiple photographs of unrelated subjects from the verifiable pool.
Two of the incorrect Research Grade observations in Experiment v0.1 were of this type which we estimate to be ~350k observations in the entire iNaturalist dataset. The norm up until now to make these observations casual has been to set an identification to the nearest taxonomic node shared by the multiple subjects and then vote no to “Based on the evidence can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?”, but many found this process to be clunky and confusing. We hope this new Data Quality Assessment condition will make it easier for the community to remove these observations from the verifiable pool where they negatively impact data quality and distort features on iNaturalist (such computer vision model training and the browse photo tool) that assume observation photos all relate a single labeled subject.
Please let us know if you notice any issues with this new DQA item.