i agree with most of what you said about potential misunderstandings without proper context.
besides cases where multiple species are present in, say, a single photo, i was afraid that this could be misused by some to flag cases were there are multiple individuals (of the same species) in the evidence. after all, iNat does say in various places that an observation is supposed to represent one individual organism in one place and time, although folks (like me) don’t always abide by that strictly and sometimes include many individuals in a single observation.
that said, maybe this feedback is best made in that blog post, rather than in the forum.
the blog post has diverse threads of discussion, so to keep it in focus, I’d prefer to discuss this further in the forum (however, there are now already two separate threads about this topic in the forum)
As for multiple individuals in one photo - iNat staff does not state this is discouraged. They say, there needs to be a subject - so for observations with only one photo, this just a hypothetical choice of you to state ‘this one bird in the flock is my subject’. It only becomes relevant when multiple photos are added, and all of them should be associated with the same subject (semantics…)
But the initial problem is - one obs - with many photos - of a frog, and a daisy, and a tree, and something. We cannot ID because there are many species, and the observer needs to split them up into separate obs.
frog
daisy
tree
something else or other.
This new DQA is the solution to that particular problem.
The other problems will need their own solutions in future.
It makes sense to me that this flag would apply only when there are two or more photos/recordings and each one is targeted at a different species. Beyond that lies chaos, I think.
The annotation issue ties in with being able to annotate single pictures.
Pic 1 flower
Pic 2 fruit
Pic 3 leaf detail
Pic 4 wide view
Pic 5 habitat
Pic 6 flower bracts
and and and
The way iNat is now - if I ask for pictures of fruit, I get pictures - and some of them are fruit. But I have to hunt for them. If I observe a plant and annotate as flower and fruit - both IDs apply to ALL my pictures for that obs. iNat working as intended, but neither helpful nor logical.
I would like to ask for pictures of This fruit and get back 20 pictures of that fruit. That is a reasonable expectation ?
Solution without breaking iNat principles: for the same individual, create multiple observations over several days. One obs on monday: photo of its fruit. One obs on tuesday: photo of its foliage. One obs on wednesday: photo of its pretty flower. Annotate accordingly (fruit / no evidence of / flower), maybe adding link to other obs (and therefore parts) of that individual.
Easy :)
I didn’t ask how to split an observation, I asked how the observer would know what to do once the observation has been flagged. The answer is that the observer will not know.
In short, the new DQA is useless (for the reviewer and for the observer) and reviewers go on posting comments that explain the observers what to do.
On the contrary, I would expect that the observer receives automatically a notification explaining the situation and what to do.
This is no different than any of the other DQA fields (not wild, date inaccurate, no evidence of organism, etc.).
I’ve always assumed that using the DQA does not replace communicating with the observer that there is an issue with the observation. I generally leave a comment when I tick one of the DQA boxes. There are a few specific circumstances where I won’t:
if the matter in question has already been mentioned to the observer;
if the observer has uploaded multiple observations with the same problem (e.g., potted plants not marked as cultivated, in which case I will comment on one or two of the observations and note that they need to check their others as well);
if I am countering a DQA vote that has made the observation casual and is an obvious misclick (e.g., the “not wild” box is easy to accidentally check when using the identify module)
But otherwise it seems to me that it behooves me to let the observer know what I am doing and why, since otherwise they may not realize that there is a problem. I agree that it would be useful if observers would receive notifications about DQA changes. However, in a lot of cases the observer might not understand why the DQA has been used or what needs to be fixed unless it is explained to them – because they are a new user and don’t understand iNat, or because they accidentally mixed something up while uploading and don’t know that they did so.
So even if DQAs were changed so that they generate notifications, I don’t think this would completely eliminate the need for comments in such cases.
I was able to clear my entire project 2k ish obs because of this one tickmark. If single-photo landscape type shots are deemed off limits for this tool use, I will put all those back into the project to be treated in the more labor-intensive old fashioned method. lmk ;)
Update: Landscape types are back in the project with new tickmark taken back off.
I think it probably would be fine to use it for landscape shots without an identifiable target - probably more accurate in that case than the commonly used “no evidence of organism” to make these types of observations casual. But that’s just my interpretation.
Presuming there are plants in the image, that’s what I identify single photo landscape observations as. A lot of people can ID stuff from far away so I wouldn’t try to make these casual grade unless it was clear nothing was identifiable (and then I’d use the other existing DQA option re: community taxon).
Well yes, that would indeed be feasible, but for an IDer it would be decidedly detrimental. With all but the commonest of plants, a plant IDer needs to be able to access simultaneously as many features of that plant as possible, without having to wait for days, or to go searching among the observer’s other obs (that is just not going to happen most of the time). Annotating individual photos would seem to be the only way round this, although it would obviously mean more work for the observer and/or annotater.
Using hypertext links within each obs makes life easy for identifiers, to browse all the daily pics for an individual spread over several obs.
Annotating individual photos is not possible, and probably won’t be for a very long time…
Well, multi-day hikes are a thing :) And it sometimes takes several visits to grasp all the details and beauty of the scenery, flora etc. Of course one has to keep tabs of the location of each and every individual to photograph daily (‘checkpoints’ function on a GPS…).
Well yes, of course, but that would be SO labour-intensive, that I just can’t see it being done, not by an observer and even more so not by an identifier. I’m a pretty conscientious observer, but I doubt if even I would do it, unless in very special circumstances. And is it really going to be in iNat’s long-term interest to have maybe five observations of the very same organism on the very same day in the very same place? Wouldn’t that create an irresolvable headache for researchers and/or statistical analysis in the future?