[Note: Topic is annotating other people’s observations who didn’t post separate observations for (e.g.) eggs and nestlings on a nest.] Now that birds are nesting actively, there are lots of photos that depict adults, fledglings, and eggs together. Unlike Evidence of Presence, there is only one choice allowed for Life Stage. It would be great if this field would also allow annotation for such photos with more than one such stage; often the observer doesn’t specify adult, nestling, or egg as the target individual (even if they did, it seems helpful to annotate all so those searching for eggs would find such images). Am I missing something? Thoughts?
I generally just mark them as Reviewed and move on.
I took some words out of your post to indicate my vote:
Whichever life stage is the most rare in iNat observations, the most valuable for research purposes, the most valuable for phenology . . . I would use that one. Just my opinion; I could easily be wrong. I’m here to learn.
That is my thought, too—as the vast majority of vertebrate obs are of adults, for example, any time there is a juvenile, I annotate it for that. In the case of birds it’s nice that you can record the presence of an egg, and also note either a juvenile or adult for life stage.
I have wondered about that, too—and what about when you have both male and female? There isn’t an option for choosing both. Would that be a data point of any value to those doing a search, I wonder?
You can add observation fields
I’m pretty sure staff have said not to annotate observations with multiple life stages; I can’t find the exact posts, but here are 3 posts where staff have implied this:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lets-talk-annotations/627/15
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lets-talk-annotations/627/40
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lets-talk-annotations/627/441
[I’d also like to note that for some bird species, it can take 2+ years for them to become adults, so juveniles/immatures are present year round too.] If you have the time and energy, I’d recommend asking the observer to duplicate the observation for each life stage.
When I said earlier than I mark them as Reviewed and move on, I was talking about observations that have, for example, one photo of a caterpillar, one of a cocoon, and one of an adult. However, if all the photos show more than one life stage, I might annotate the rarer one - eg. an adult moth or butterfly laying eggs I would probably choose to annotate as Egg.
if it’s an adult and an egg, i tend to go with adult but add both egg and organism as evidence of organism
i feel like this is a similar issue to annotating sex on a mating pair, i’m not sure why multiple annotations aren’t possible for life stage and sex.
Because iNaturalist rather idiosyncratically defines an observation as an encounter with a particular individual at a particular place and time; for most animals, any given individual cannot have multiple life stages or multiple sexes at one time.
Sounds like a case for multiple observations of same photo, each focusing on a different individual, thus only 1 lifestage
Yes, the key principle is that an observation is for a specific individual organism. You can pick whichever one you wish to annotate, though if the observer indicates the specific organism that the observation is for, annotaters should respect that choice.