You don’t have to be able to ID the organism which is a major advantage. Tracks and Scat are annotations that a lot of people forget to use probably due to using the phone app. They often make a comment in notes so sometimes they tell you what you are looking at.
Similarly if you don’t mind looking at dead animals, annotating dead animals is useful as well as marking the evidence for this eg bone, hair, organism. And if it’s obvious roadkill, add them to the roadkill projects.
You don’t have to annotate everything. Pick the thing you can confidently do.
It’s a great way of learning about a species. Eg I’ve been checking out Mictis profana (Crusader bug) today. I am not a bug person although I have to say that I’m getting interested. The adult has a cross on its back, the older nymph has two dots on its back, the early nymphs have a white outline around the abdo. After annotating lots and lots I realised the tips of the adult antennae were orange but the nymphs still had a small black area distal to the orange. So even when you get an oddball photo at a weird angle you probably can annotate most things. And this species can be annotated for sex by the back legs with males having thick bodybuilder femora and a distinct spike on the tibia, and females having relative skinny legs.
You don’t have to annotate everything. If you are not sure, you can leave that one out. If you get bored or fed up, you can stop and we will appreciate every annotation you have done.
Caterpillars are larvae, a butterfly is an adult. Those who are into caterpillars will love you for sorting those out.
Spiderwebs = construction.
Those funny little graphs/charts will be a lot more accurate so people will be able to figure out when is the best time to look for the organism or the particular lifestage.
You may find misidentified organisms or ones that are not really expected in your area.
And you may find you acquire enough knowledge through pattern recognition that you are able to start identifying a few extra organisms.
Fully agree. I decided to annotate all the Australian Loranthaceae for flowers and fruit before taking on finishing up the IDs (less mental effort), but in the process, I’ve become more attuned to details important for IDs.
For my own observations, if possible, I always use the annotations. However, I think the ‘‘life stage’’ annotations for birds, with the only three options currently being ‘‘adult’’, ‘‘egg’’ and ‘‘juvenile’’, are too limited to be useful. We at least need the option ‘‘immature’’ added for birds to properly use the annotations for this class as it happens too often that a bird is technically not in its juvenile stage anymore and not yet an adult either. We also have ‘‘pupa’’ for insects, so why not ‘immature’’ for birds? Also ‘‘hatchling’’ (bird in its down stage before attaining the first true feathers of the juvenile plumage) and ‘‘age unknown’’ (sometimes it is just too hard to tell) could be useful. As long as those options are not availabe, annotating birds feels like a waste of time because I do not feel like I am providing any useful information. Going one step further, iNat could even integrate the whole molt terminology of the WRP-system (First-cycle Formative, Definitive Basic and so on) for proper age classification, although most users will be unfamiliar with that system.
I’m working through Monarchs world-wide because I had a theory that their migratory nature might cause a dissonance where people think habitat is plentiful because they see adult monarchs, when in reality they’re actually only laying eggs in a few places. It doesn’t look like it’s true so far, but I made a project for it if anyone else wants a look. It has all butterflies, so you can look at any species of interest, but it only counts annotated eggs and larva
I enjoy annotating. Some tricks I use to speed it up are:
Concentrate on one type of annotation at a time: e.g. annotating “Flowers and Fruits”, rather than annotating everything for a particular observation. This makes things much faster if you’re using the shortcuts.
Use the filters on the Identify tab: e.g. select Without Annotation “Flowers and Fruits = Any”.
Set filters to “Reviewed = Any”, as you may have already IDd observations but not annotated them yet. Or you may have annotated for “Leaves” but not for “Flowers and Fruits”
Set filters to include “Research Grade” observations, not just “Needs ID”
Use the “Search Species” field to narrow it down futher. (e.g. if you just select “Plants”, it will include mosses, which don’t have an annotation for fruits and flowers, so use Search Species to pick out only “Flowering Plants”)
Learn the keyboard shortcuts, including for next photo and next observation. It’s much faster than clicking everything. (Make sure you’re on the Annotations tab for the observation, or the annotation shortcuts won’t work!)
Remember that you can assign more than one annotation to a field, e.g. a plant may have fruits AND flowers.
I focus on observations in a particular location rather than working on all observations, everywhere. That way I can see the numbers going down and feel like I’ve achieved something.
Annotations for plants are terrible. The “Sex” annotations are essentially entirely useless, as there are a much larger range than just “male” or “female”, so this annotation only applies to a very limited range of plants, and “unknown” is incorrect, as the sex is often known. I actually ended up making an Observation Field for “Plant Reproductive Type” ( https://inaturalist.nz/observation_fields/13804 ) that has:
Female
Male
Bisexual/Monoecious
Apomictic
Sterile
The ‘Flowers and Fruit’ annotations also only applies to Angiosperms, as they are the only flowering and fruiting plants. So conifers are left out of this, as they produce cones that then disperse seeds. Ferns also do not fit anywhere in here, and neither do mosses or liverworts.
And ‘Leaves’ is heavily biased towards European/North American angiosperm trees that are deciduous. In Aotearoa this annotation is essentially useless, as all but a couple of species are ‘Evergreen’, and many have leaves that are coloured regardless of the time of year. This annotation also excludes plants that have other types of foliage, or which have other photosynthetic organs.
It really seems like whoever decided on plant annotations had little-to-no idea about plants except “they green”.
I do a little leaf annotation; some species in my Australian taxon of interest, even though they are not deciduous, have red leaves at certain times. Whether this means anything, I don’t know. I’d probably have to do a complete annotation set to work it out.
It would be great IF iNat would allow adding images to posting. Many of be bat calls I have reviewed woudl benefit from showing how to ID the bats they were claiming they were. Not posting a data file per se, but a sonogram/image of the diagnostic vocal signature of the species. This would serve to educate the Cit. Sci. folk so they could improve on their IDs. So spake an acoustic ID bat guy with 30 yrs of experience.
