Platform(s): website
Description of need:
I would love to have the option to disqualify annotations in my project such as dead, scat or tracks so I can actually find out what kind of animals people find that are alive instead of just some tracks or a dead animal. Setting the annotation requirement to alive kinda works but disqualifies any observation that doesn’t have the annotation set to alive which seems to be about 80% of the observations.
The other side of that, is that we observers need to annotate more. I look at plants, want to see pictures of fruit so I annotate others for that. But now I have learnt to annotate my own as flowering.
Personal assignment to annotate my own animals as - almost all - alive.
This would soooo handy! I study two organisms that make burrows (tiger beetles and cicadas), and lots of observations of holes appear for both. However, there are an awful lot of creatures that make holes, and so that calls into question how many of those observations are accurate or useful. So, it would be great to be able to automatically screen them out in a project.
Love this idea! Seeing dead animals is really tough for me, so I’d like to be able to exclude as many as possible from my search results. And perhaps more importantly, it seems like it would be very helpful for researchers as well.
even beyond getting this to work within the context of projects, i think you would need to get this to work in the context of regular filters when searching for observations. there’s a discussion here that describes some of the changes that should probably happen first before i think it would make sense to even attempt your feature request: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identify-filter-without-annotation-not-working-properly/30148.
your feature request is probably also a variant of https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/collection-project-using-without-annotation-filter/28212. that other one would probably have to happen first or in conjunction with your particular request here.
which is why I annotate dead as I ID … for later
Every clean empty shell that you find on a beach is technically “dead”, and yet I don’t imagine you mind seeing images of those, do you?
I upload hundreds, if not thousands, of observations of those every year.
but so much more interesting to see the shell while it is living.
Yes, but being human we often can’t see very well what is going on underwater, unless we are lucky enough to often be scuba diving, snorkeling, or tide pooling, so seeing the behavior of live mollusks can be difficult for us to do.
I would think a clean empty shell would be evidence of presence, much like when I find fur, feathers, antlers, porcupine quills.
Yeah I would agree with this
Yes, that is right, although most dead shells look a great deal more like the live animal than antlers or quills do.
Yeah, but it’s a different annotation, it is still dead.
For me, it is pictures. Or the ones that live at the sea edge of the beach.