Hello everyone! I enjoy searching for species, especially birds, in places I plan to visit or would like to visit. However, I’ve noticed more and more often that multiple observations show not only the same species (which is completely fair) but the same individual (sometimes it is uploaded also wi…

Presence data is unavoidably biased by the observers and how busy they are. If they’re going to the same spot every day and observing the same bird each time, it’s valid for those all to be separate observations (and I don’t think you should be bugging them into deleting them). I don’t think it’s w…

The other side of the split vs lump for multiple images is what if you watch a butterfly or cicada emerge over several hours? You might well get interesting things to see that merit different observations and stringing them all into one kind of breaks the “point in time” assumption about observation…

I think this can be an issue if someone wants to use the data for research purposes. In these case, it would be necessary, and probably feasible, to gather all the observations of the same species placed in a circle of n meters radius. In other cases, maybe, it could be better to leave this issue b…

I’ve never see more than a few duplicates of a single individual by the same observer on the same date. If it “wastes my time” then it is only seconds.

Unfortunately I’ve stumbled upon multiple duplications of a single individual This is just an example with observations of Coracias garrulus. It is 100% a single bird on a wire but it has at least 6 observations about it. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/161284455 https://www.inaturalist…

7 obs of the one bird - 7 IDs by others - could have taken 6 other obs to RG instead. Ultimately it comes down to where identifiers choose to spend their iNat time, and trying to get obs out of the Needs ID pool for the next identifier. I Mark as Reviewed and push to Casual (within guidelines)

If it’s the same individual on the same date at the same place, all the photos should be placed in a single observation. Here’s somebody’s copypasta that I’ve used to deal with this: "Hi, it looks like photos of this organism are uploaded as separate observations. On iNaturalist, multiple photos o…

I understand that, and ideally they would all be within a single observation. But what’s the actual problem with them being different observations?

For me, a major difficulty of photos of a single plant being posted as different observation is that very often I need to see more than one structure for the identification. If they’re in different observations, I never get them together so I can’t make the ID or I can’t ID all of them. Even if al…

How can you treat multiple observations that depict the same individual?

General

edonardo July 12, 2024, 5:31pm 13

I usually identify only one observation too, but there is the risk that the other observation will be identified in another way and maybe both will get the Research Level.

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How can you treat multiple observations that depict the same individual?

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