Hi iNatters. I’m just an amateur observer but I’d like to make my observations as useful as I can. What is the bestway to indicate animal behaviors for those who use the data for research? There seem to be a bunch of fields: Behaviour, Animal Behavior, Interaction, etc. that folks are using, so first I need to pick the right one, and then I need to figure out the best termnology for describing the behavior. The most common example for me is observing insects visiting flowers. Is that important to note, and if so, what’s the best way to note it? I’ve seen “visiting flower”, “collecting pollen”, etc.
It’s not that easy to do because the iPhone version doesn’t seem to support it, so I only want to add behaviors that folks care about. Perhaps I should focus more on behaviors that are unusual? Like, the raccoon sleeping in my car under the engine block in 90 degree weather (yes, that really happened, though I didn’t photograph it.)
You hit the crux of the problem with observation fields - there is no standardization. And the site has been very clear they will not introduce any standardization.
The best thing to do is pick one of the options and stick with it, since you cant control the duplication.
If you go here and search for the different names, if you click on the link for the fiel name you can get an idea how often it is used across the site. So for instance if (totally made up just for illustration) ‘Behaviour’ has 258 pages of records using it and ‘Animal Behaviour’ has 17 pages, you might want to use the first one.
Document what you think is valuable, and even more importantly what you yourself want to track.
Thanks for your reply! Unfortunately I don’t really have any idea what is valuable to others. Behaviors aren’t valuable to me so I will leave them out, and I guess if there is anyone out there who is interested in them, perhaps they will let people know their preferred terminology.