You should make separate observations for each separate organism you encounter.
I failed twice to communicate that to the original poster of that observation. The poster seems like at least 10x the iNaturalist user that I am, and possibly 100x the naturalist that I am. The observation is of a rare plant. I don’t want to annoy them further, but feel they might be breaking a rule.
Maybe Asplenium trichomanes has rhizomes and these three apparent individuals are actually a single colonial organism, like Aspen Tree “groves” connected underground, but I think Asplenium rhizomes are only a couple centimeters long. :shrug: The first photo shows one growing over what looks like a crack in the underlying rock. The second photo shows one with Heuchera nearby. The third shows one with neither of those things.
I discussed it with ChatGPT and it pointed me to this:
Which seems to be answering a slightly different question, but gives contradictory advice:
Please do not vote ‘No’ to the ‘Evidence related to a single subject’… When there are different individuals of the same species in separate photos (e.g. photo 1 shows a female adult lion and photo 2 shows an adult male lion and photo 3 shows a lion cub).
That seems like it precisely contradicts the whole point of the observation field. So I’m hoping real humans can sort this out for me.
P.S. Weakley’s Flora doesn’t even list this subspecies. Nor does Wikipedia have an article on it. I feel like I don’t have the tools to make an informed assessment of what’s even going on here.
“should” implies that it is a guideline rather than a rule. There are lots of people who think treating this as a hard rule is uh…suboptimal. What if you come upon a forest of trees that are the same species? Or an anthill? A flock of birds?
You can follow the rule if you want to. I personally don’t recommend it.
iNat’s rules say – one individual per obs. According to that, you could make a 100 obs for a flock of birds. But. It is reasonable to make this An Obs for One Species.
The single subject DQA is for my dog – a lily – bit of moss. That must be 3 separate obs.
This is the nominate ssp among 14 ssp listed on iNat. I would be more wary of the ssp which have only a few obs. They range from 2 !! to 1.2K
Generally, if all the organisms fit into one photo, I don’t really pay much mind. Sometimes I’ll “pick” and organism in the group to fill out fields and annotations, but I usually only do that to my own observations (I can’t remember if I’ve ever done it to someone else’s, but now I would say that’s a bad practice).
This is a different situation where someone went out of their way to take photos of individual organisms that aren’t relatively close to each other (relative to the context of the other photos). This is important for future taxon splits and also disagreements like the ones in this observation
Personally, I never put different individuals into the same observation, unless they’re all in the frame together. But other users do, and while it’s not recommended, I don’t think it warrants a DQA downvote. In terms of how it impacts other users, the downside to making three separate observations is that it’s three times the number of things an identifier has to identify. But the downside to putting them together is that if a mistake is made in the ID of one of the individuals, it’s harder to deal with. Personally if I come across one of these types of observations, I just ignore it, especially if I’m only certain on the IDs of the individuals in some of the photos. I’d only use the “single subject” DQA if I’m fairly certain that the photos depict multiple species.
Isn’t it identified as the nominate subspecies? I don’t know botanical rules as well as zoological rules, but I would think A. trichomanes trichomanes has to be a valid subspecies name if any other subspecies have been described.
This rule was created to counter issues where people posted an observation with multiple photos, where each photo was totally different taxa. Please do not overthink this rule to interpret it as a strict guideline that you can’t have multiple individuals of that species shown in one observation. As long as it represents that moment, location, and taxon, it is valid.
Since annotations, some people will encourage you to split observations out if you have different life stages (e.g. an adult, and then an immature), since you can only apply one of some annotations per observation, but it is not required.
Yeah, I read the rule as.separate obs for each organism (or taxon) encountered not individual. You can include separate photos of male and female birds in one obs if they are a pair. Or individual plants in a cluster of all the same species. If the observer is in error and includes a different species as subject in one photo, then it’s necessary to delete or make a separate obs for that photo.
But in that example, the observer is convinced that it is the same individual. Even if they were following the rule religiously, they would have put both photos in the same observation. ( I agree with you, the second photo does look like a different species)
I see the opposite as well - people post multiple photos of the same individual as separate observations. Sometimes it’s because the observer doesn’t know how to combine photos into one observation, but I’ve seen plenty of cases where the observer absolutely knows how to do it, but they don’t recognize that the same individual appears in multiple photos (and yeah, I can).
I see far more instances of too-many-observations-of-the-same species than I see “oops, multiple species in the same photo”. When I do see an instance of the latter, it’s almost always completely unrelated species (like, not even in the same order). I rarely see look-alike species in the same observation - but that’s probably going to be something that varies wildly between different regions/taxa.
A. trichomanes sensu stricto is a diploid found both in Eurasia and North America, generally found on acidic substrates. A. trichomanes subsp. quadrivalens, recognized in newer floras (including, I think, FSUS) as A. quadrivalens, is a tetraploid of Eurasia and North America limited to alkaline substrates. They are separable by rather subtle microcharacters, but IIRC, Haines used the European characters in Flora Novae-Angliae and they turned out not to fully work out for the North American plants. (There’s some subtle explanation for this involving introgression in the European gene pool that I don’t fully recall.) The FSUS characters may work better; I think Harvey Ballard has been IDing these in North America in the past year or so. You can see why I am not eager to promote these to full species, even if they are in reproductive isolation.
Anyway, to the original point, it would be rather unusual for adjacent individuals to belong to two different subspecies, at least in North America.
It would be nice if the rule page about this could be amended slightly so it doesn’t suggest, at a glance, that multiple individuals should always be separated.
“iNat’s rules say – one individual per obs. According to that, you could make a 100 obs for a flock of birds. But. It is reasonable to make this An Obs for One Species.”
I completely agree. I think that rule can be ridiculous if it is applied universally to every observation.
Here is an example - a photo of lichen on a rock. Specifically I am going with the small black speck-like lichen. Each black speck is a separate organism. If I were to follow the rules, I would need to submit over 400 observations, in order to ensure that all of the organisms are observed, and that there is only one organism per observation. I refuse to do that. I will do it my way, not the rule’s way, and enter all 400+ organisms as one single observation.
If I recall correctly (though I don’t know a “citation”), the current wording on the explanation page for the DQA is essentially a compromise. Ideally, by iNat’s definition of an observation, each individual organism should have it’s own observation (i.e., the same individual organism should be present in all media for an observation).
However, when this DQA was created, there was lots of discussion noting that many users will not necessarily be able to distinguish individuals or may upload media of a flock/group and distinguishing individuals of the same species may be very difficult. So the wording that was implemented essentially says to not use the DQA as long as all individuals are of the same species (or subspecies as the case may be) as this really isn’t the issue that the DQA was created to address. That situation is observations with individuals of different species that would create problems if they go to RG or otherwise require IDing to a common ancestor and using “No, it’s as good as can be” to ID correctly.
I think by and large that approach has ended up working well, despite occasional questions about how to use the DQA in scenarios like this. It’s not perfect, but better than the disputes about and loss of otherwise correctly-identified observations to Casual that would arise with a “strict” use of the DQA, and it’s certainly better than not having the DQA available at all.
NB: I removed the link to the specific observation from the OP since it could be interpreted as calling out a user’s behavior on iNaturalist.
Every photo can only contain a single species and only a single member of each species
When individual organisms are easy to separate (in SEPARATE PHOTOGRAPHS), each individual should get its own observation.
Flocks and communal organisms, or photos that contain multiple individuals of one species are totally fine. I don’t think anyone is arguing that point.
This question was about posting separate photos of separate individuals to one iNaturalist observation. There are some slightly contradictory statements about this in the official documentation, but the consensus seems to be that this is fine so long as each photo shows the same species. What we want to avoid is one photo of a tree and another of a bird being combined in the same observation.
There is some danger that separate photos of what look superficially like the same species could turn out to be different species. But the consensus is that this would be the time to use the “Evidence related to a single subject: No” with an explanation asking the OP to split the observation.
This might be cleared up by changing the wording of the Data Quality flag to “Evidence related to a single SPECIES.” Though probably some clarification to the help docs I referenced earlier would be better.
