Helpfull comments on Seasonality

[Ajott]

Hi,

just reading another question about seasonality reminded me of something I wondered myself recently.
There are areas in the world with not too much observers. If those have a special interest in photographing certain types of organisms the display of seasonality might actually more reflect activities of this one person then of a species.

An example to make it more clear what I mean: I have great interest in amphibians and am lucky enough to have a colony of a cool species in my backyard, which had not been documented all too often by others yet.
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/906968-Gastrotheca-cuencana
I always liked to photograph them. But while I just took occasional shots in the first few months of living here, now due to the worldwide situation being mainly restricted to my backyard, I started a little project to observe their patterns and see how loyal they are to the locality, meaning I look for them every night and took a lot of pictures recently. I am now by far the most successful observer of this species, meaning, the seasonality curve shows mostly my activity. One can not only clearly see, when the curfew started and I needed something to do, but also that I was on holiday last year in August ;-)
I know that we have the species in the backyard all year around, so the curve does not say so much about the species behaviour actually and it would be pretty missleading for anyone who does not know the background. I have similiar situation with other species I observe a lot.

Is there any possibility to make circumstances like that clear on the species page?

Thanks!

[bug_girl]

Lol, I had never considered that. Thanks for bringing it up!

[fffffffff]

That sounds exactly as part of the video conference that was posted yesterday, citizen science shows the activity of people a lot more than usual science methods that try to eliminate that. Nothing bad in that though, with decades there will be enough data, and what we have today is not that bad too. One well documented piece of land is not less worthy than many acres.

[exonie]

On the taxon pages, you can see the total of observations. On the map you can see the distribution of observations. You can see how many users observed the taxon by clicking the Leadership button. Using the API you can collect and analyse that information programmatically. So anyone wishing to analyse the data has the tools to do so.

Clicking the question button next to the graph explains the pitfalls of citizen science as already mentioned. I don’t see what else could be done to make matters clearer or easier.

[Ajott]

I have to admit, I never saw the question button. Yes, the information there is what I was missing, thanks. Maybe it could a bit more prominent? When I didn’t see it, maybe others have the same issue?