How to include only water-related life in project

General
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1

Hello-- we want to create projects including only life in subtidal, intertidal, and close-to-shoreline areas, including birds that come and go. One aim is to ID algae and hydrozoans. Another is to collect data that reflects change over time and is relevant to various environmental issues.

Do folks have advice on how to do this?
Here are two choices we seem to face:

  1. If we create a new place, we either exclude some observations that have large radii of uncertainty, or we include more terrestrial life than we want. We also burden iNat.
    If we use a large existing place but try to exclude phyla, we have to exclude many – maybe a bigger burden on iNat. Since we have to include very broad categories like Life (to deal with uncertain algae and hydrozoans), we’d probably get a lot of low-quality terrestrial observations.

  2. If we use a collection project, many things are easier, but we can’t define custom fields. We can add them to individual observations, but it’s work.
    If we use a traditional project, we can define information we want, but we lose nice features of collections and have to work to get observations included.

Thanks for any thoughts! I also can be reached at f5creeks@gmail.com.

2

My project on freshwater plants of the Greater Antilles is a collection project with an area, a positive list of taxa and a few exclusions.
Am so far very happy with it, the species list might still need a little more fine-tuning though, especially when it comes to Cyperaceae.

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/plantas-aquaticas-de-los-antillas-majores

This project obviously does not collect observations of aquatic plants that are still stuck on higher taxonomical levels. It can however give a fast overview on the aquatic plant species that have already been observed in the area, and in that way help identifiers with IDs.