there is a plant in the background?
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This first one is a soaptree yucca
The others are all over the place
I had @lincolndurey woke me up to a few IDs
Where 10 photos were 10 different flora and fauna items most I’ve noticed come from
First time postings or people who are new to
INat…
I’ve even made this mistake I believe the first month on here
Maybe calling it life would be better
This adds to the problem if the user does come back to remove photos. Now everyone who added the disagreeing coarse ID is preventing RG at the correct finer level. Plus there’s currently no easy way to go back and check if the photos were removed – no notification and no search filter.
The category can be simply something like “All photos of same species”. It would be even better if it were searchable like the captive flag. Then people could easily return to check if the photos were removed.
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just ask them to tag you when they have deleted the photos… there will be more that don’t delete the photos than there will be “delete but don’t tell you” ones
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A “multiple observations” check-box, alongside the “captive” one, that reduces the status of the observation to casual might be a good idea, allowing these multiple observation postings to be taken out of the “needs ID” pool, but making them searchable if a decision about what to do with them is made in the future. Perhaps it could also automatically send a “this appears to be multiple observations, please split them up” message to the user who posted them.
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Sorry if I am too long, but I try also to synthesize the discussion.
No suggested solution seems complete and easy for all users (from the beginner to the curator).
The multiple-species observations issue happens so often that I wouldn’t suggest to charge the curators with it. I guess curators have more added value with many other issues. We need a solution so that everyone can contribute to solving the issue.
My own concern with this issue is that I would like not to see anymore unrelated pictures in a taxon page. More generally, multiple-species observations degrade the quality of iNaturalist contents. As already pointed out, it also impacts the AI (Artificial Intelligence) that gets fed with irrelevant data. I guess the projects are also impacted.
Another concern is the loss of potential value of these observations. I consider this as less important than the degradation effects.
A significant part of the discussion is about DQA (Data Quality Assesment).
I think we need a new category in the DQA panel because:
- This is what the DQA in general if for.
- The current categories in the DQA panel do not match the multiple-species observations issue.
- A new category would allow all of us to mark these observations. Later, when we will have “the” solution, we could apply it to the marked observations. (No currently existing DQA category can serve this purpose, a dedicated category is needed).
- The marked observations would not appear anymore in any taxon page and would not be taken into account by AI.
In short, I suggest a new dedicated DQA category now, some simple treatments to be applied now for limiting the impacts, and other solutions to define/apply later on the already flagged solutions.
I think it is important to have a friendly solution. I don’t really like applying a high level ID just to break the current ID, because I wish to remove a content from the taxon page. And IDs are not for that.
I think that any DQA vote should be notified to the observation owner. The difference between a DQA vote and a textual comment is that DQA votes can be exploited automatically (each DQA item has a definite meaning), while comments cannot (the semantic is open). But for the observation owner, it’s the same: a remark about his/her observation. If a dedicted DQA category is created for multiple-species observations, of course votes need to be notified to the owner (so that he/she is aware of the need to split the observation), but there is the same need for all DQA votes.
As an IT engineer, I also pay attention to propose solutions that are less expensive to develop. Adding a new DQA category is cheap if it reuses a common existing mechanism, it doesn’t even need new UI stuff, it doesn’t need much testing effort.
Congratulations to all contributors, this platform is really great!
And your online support to beginners is much appreciated.
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Fell over this among the gazanias.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9877997
A day lily - exotic here.
Person hasn’t been active since February.
Bonus points since the user has opted out of Community Taxon.
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Thank you for the thoughtful reasponse.
Observations IDed to high level like Plantae won’t be used to train the AI, so adding a high-level ID should help in that regard.
I’d push back on this. An ID represents one’s assessment of the evidence at hand, so a high level ID accurately achieves that. I do agree that it’s not the friendliest method, which is why it should be accompanied with a welcoming, non-judgemental comment about what constitutes an observation.
This is currently being worked in the iNat team’s notifications revamp. I wouldn’t be opposed to a DQA if the observer was notified about it. Something like “Photos are of the same individual” could work. But for new users, it would still be best to have a comment and explanation.
@dianastuder, the iNat forum is for constructive conversations, not complaints or for calling out individuals. Please only add comments that will move the discussion forward.
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Hmm… I didn’t read anything unconstructive in @dianastuder’s comment. At the time she visited the observation, there were two photos – a Gazania and a Day Lily – and she felt that “Plantae” was the most appropriate ID to provide. I read her comment here as highlighting an example of the issue this thread is discussing: How and whether to split observations that include photos of multiple taxa.
That the observer has been inactive for nearly a year points out a big limitation of relying on users to fix their own observations. That can only work for the subset of users who remain active.
That the user chose to opt out of community ID points out a second limitation. Nothing the community can do can now change the primacy of the observer’s taxon selection. It seems overwhelmingly likely that the user who uploaded this as their fourth observation did not understand all the implications of opting out of community ID.
Can I assume that iNat staff don’t really object when people use the forum to highlight observations that are a challenge for current iNat processes? I didn’t get the impression that @dianastuder was making any kind of personal attack on the user whose observation she highlighted.
In this case, we’re kind of fortunate that @pdfuenteb detected that image #2 is actually a copyrighted image not taken by the observer. That allowed a curator to delete the image and so now we’re down to a single image that other users can try to accurately ID.
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It’s certainly possible I misinterpreted the comment, but I don’t think examples are necessary at this point in the discussion - the problem has been defined. I’m not convinced that the discussions like this benefit from more examples being appended to them, especially without a suggestion for how to solve or at least mitigate it. However, I didn’t assume @dianastuder meant well, so I do apologize.
It’s fine to use an example or two, but I think it’s best to do so early on, or if you do want to use an example, use it as a way to push things forward.
I don’t want to derail this topic any more; if anyone has question about forum activity, best practices, or moderation, please use the Forum Feedback category or message @moderators.
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I’m very much in support of @jeanphilippeb’s proposal to have a Data Quality Assessment field such as “Images are of the same individual(s)” that, when false, makes the observation casual and removes its images from use in illustrating the taxon or consideration by AI.
Importantly, this assessment should also trigger a notification that explains to the multiple-image issue to the observer and helps them fix it. This seems like something for which iNat could seek community help with translation.
There is no circumstance in which a user who uploads a photo of a daisy and a daffodil to the same observation was looking to have some smart-alec iNat identifier tell them that the lowest common parent taxon for these is “Angiospermae”. Equally, there is no researcher who would find value in an observation that cannot be improved beyond that subphylum ID.
An easy way for identifiers to quickly and politely inform observers that photos need to be split into separate observations would help everyone involved. This is something I do now. A minority of observers remain active or return to the site and they’re universally happy to be alerted to the issue.
I can see several incremental improvements that would enhance this new DQA capability:
- Logic that preserves this “Same individual” DQA flag when an observation is duplicated, but resets it on the original or duplicate observation when an image is deleted.
- Workflow linked from the notification that the observer receives to guide them through the process of splitting the observation.
- A policy that permits observations where same_individual=false for which the observer has been inactive for more than a specific threshold (90 days? 1 year?) to be automatically split into multiple observations, each still owned by the observer and with appropriate notification.
For the last one, I appreciate the hesitancy to override an observer’s control, but I just don’t see a scenario where this is problematic. Today, when I add comments to alert observers that their observation contains unrelated photos, most of the time nothing happens because the observer has long ago become inactive and so their observations will remain unfixed.
But let’s think through the intentions of that inactive user and their expectations if they were later to return to iNat. Let’s say I upload an observation with pictures of a daisy and a daffodil, don’t return to iNat for a long time, and then come back and find I now have two observations, each IDed to species level. In what scenario would my intentions have been disrespected?
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I think this is quite reasonable. The only problem though is the location data - the observation’s marked location is pulled only from the first photo in the upload, I believe. So if someone uploads 30 different species and they get split out, 29 of them probably have incorrect locations.
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Good point @graysquirrel: one location, two observations – that is definitely a challenge for an automated observation-recovery process. Same issue for date/time.
I guess both could be pulled from the image metadata in many cases.
Anyone have other thoughts on a conservative logic that could be applied?
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- Images of different individuals might be fine sometimes - multiple plants photographed to get all the characters, for example. Or less obviously, multiple examples of the same fungus. While the second is not following user policy, letting this button be worded like that will conflate tending to this second violation (if you care) with tending to the case when obs are not of the same species either, which is more serious. The biggest problem with the second in fact is that the individuals might not actually be the same, so I think species is a better term than individual in that annotation. Else the uses you want may get drowned out by the other one - it will make searching for this case hard, for instance.
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Instead of assigning the entire obs to the limbo of ‘Life’ or Plantae’ how would people feel about a feature where one could mark individual images that are not relevant to the first image’s ID as ‘no evidence of the CID organism’. They would then not appear in the image browser, and we can make the obs about the first image and ID accordingly, leaving a request the observer to split up the images.
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It’s unfortunate that it’s being interpreted that way, but it’s a protocol we came up with a the best way to deal with these to avoid having them all ‘ingested’ into the system as the wrong species. I know sometimes people interpret it as rude or odd, but ultimately, explaining the issue to them and perhaps a link to the policy (and make sure it is spelled out) is better than not doing so. Also, in terms of ‘no researcher’ finding value in something, there are so many different ways people use iNat data, so I’m not sure that’s entirely true, though I agree it is of limited value if not possible to classify beyond high-level taxonomic units.
In terms of what to do with these observations, the iNat team has said on multiple occasions they don’t want to edit other people’s observations… so a different strategy along with a flag or data quality assessment entry would be to cause the entry to focus only on the first photo - grey out the other photos - then allow that photo to be identified. That way at least some of the data can be used and perhaps the location is more likely to be accurate for the first observation noted?
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That raises the question - does the system hold the metadata from all uploaded pix (even while using only the first for the resulting observation), or just the first that then is assigned to all the other pix on the observation? If it holds all of it, that’s the time and place problems resolved, at least for those uploads that have the metadata on every pic. If the system doesn’t hold the metadata for every pic, it might be something to consider. After all, the fields are there already, and text takes up way less spaced than the images do.
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Daisy and daffodil are both Plants - is the suggested solution - which isn’t finding support even among this small group of iNatters.
- A box to tick multiple species
- which triggers a grey flag like ‘Casual’ but stating Multiple species
- which blocks the option to add an ID … until the multiples have been split.
Please don’t ID multiples - doesn’t work. It needs to be impossible to ID a Multiple
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