I have 5 observations of a wild (feral?) mexican fan palm over the course of the last three years, showing its growth progress.
the problem is that someone keeps telling me I have to delete all the earlier observations of this tree becuase it’s the same individual in multiple observations, even though they’re all from different dates:
Dec 15 2021
Feb 1 2022
Aug 7 2022
Nov 3 2022
Sept 27 2024
(I would have gotten pictures of it in 2023 but there was construction in the way)
This is the second time this person has told me I have to combine them all and delete the “extras”.
Is there some section from the guidelines I can copy and paste to explain to them that’s…not correct?? I don’t know how many people they’ve done this too and if other people didn’t know the guidelines they might have deleted the proper observations and combined them into one that can’t be research grade because it’s got photos from years apart.
An observation records an encounter with an individual organism, or recent evidence of an organism, at a particular time and location.
…
If you revisit that organism later, such as returning to a plant on a later date when it’s in bloom, you should make a separate observation because it was observed on a different date.
You are right that you should not combine them …but you might want to use the “Similar Observation Set” function under Observation Fields to link them all and show the growth/changes. It’s a pretty cool iNaturalist feature!
I used it here and if you click on it and select “view observations with this field and value” it sort of tells a story.
I usually do try to do that if I know it’s an individual I’ve seen before that I visit often, usually if I know exactly where it is I make the map marker as presice as possible, so I’ll link for its map radius in case anyone else observes it too :)
But thank you for the reminder, I just added that to these ones!