I’ve recently started adding notes to my observations to explain how I arrived at my suggested identifications. I’m doing this both to give my observations more credibility and to help others who might review them.
The challenge I’ve run into is that these notes are only visible if someone actually clicks into the observation. When using the Identify tool, it isn’t clear who is taking the time to add supporting details and who may be relying mainly on computer vision.
I was wondering: is there currently a way to filter for observations that include notes? I’d love to be able to connect with others who are also making the effort to show their work.
What is your iNaturalist username? I don’t see anyone with the username bacfa_dar, and without a specific example, it’s hard to assist. Are you adding notes to the description section or as comments attached to the observation? Both show up on Identify:
I’m not sure why my username is weird here on the forum. Luke_benjamin is my iNat handle.
When making new observations (I usually use the legacy app, iOS) I use the “Notes” feature before posting my work for my supporting documentation. I see other users utilize this feature occasionally. Because few others see my notes to support my field observations, I know others also get “missed”. I was just hoping there was a way to filter and locate these observations so I can help them reach research grade identifications if possible.
Thanks for everything all of you do, both here and on the other platforms. I believe iNaturalist and citizen science is one of the most important things happening on our planet.
The best way to achieve that is for you to ID for others. iNat needs more identifiers across the board - from generalists sorting Unknowns to Kingdom, all the way to taxon specialists for This one.
This got me curious.
While there is no direct way, there could be a way to use the API/ manual code to check for “description not empty” aka checking something along the lines of: if observation[“description”] != “”
I dont know if this exists already. @Pisum would know, I think ^^
You could try workarounds, such as searching for “a” “e” “i” or common words like “in” “with” “and”… Sadly the search for blankspaces doesn’t work (this would be my ultimate solution to get all descriptions which include at least 2 words)… I assume coding a little helper tool is the easiest approach.
I like to search for “www.” sometimes, which shows some observation with helpful links, too. But that’s not the solution either. sorry :c
yes. i’m not aware of anything regular users have to directly filter for this on the server side, but secondary filtering could be accomplished with custom code on the client side. folks who are familiar with or willing to learn Python could search the forum for @pisum lambda x to find some examples that i’ve provided for similar situations.
it may be worth noting that folks add supporting information in other ways, too. some use observation fields, tags, comments, identification notes, annotations, traditional projects, or some combination of these or other things.
