I see folks posting moose dung and calling the observation “moose,” and I myself have posted an obvious moose track and called it such. But what of the elk by the roadside that I didn’t want to harass by stopping, the black bear I was too late to “capture” in an image? These are not so important because they are plentiful …
But what of that pretty-sure swift fox i witnessed in Saskatchewan two summers back–too swift to be caught in a photo. (I”d have been so vatue as to location that no one would ever have a clue. By the way, if my photo processing software tells me it’s stripped the geolocation from the meta, can I trust that?) Even the apparent bear-scratches on a tree I saw yesterday that almost could be nothing else, except that it was my knee-height to my rib cage (bored cub?), and I’d be unable to clarify which–grizz or black. Or some guy with woodcarving tools.
You can always upload observations without media - they will be casual grade, since they cannot be confirmed by others, but can still be useful for your own records.
And as for the metadata, no need to even strip it from your photos manually - just check the “obscure location” box when you upload it.
This definitely counts as evidence! We have lots of observations of footprints, scat, feathers, molts, and burrows, and they are all welcome. I would say that a clear photo of the probable bear scratches is much more valuable than some of the indecipherable blurry insect photos I have come across. Somebody else knowledgeable might be able to take one look at them and say “yes, those are definitely bear marks” or “at that height, it’s probably actually a fisher,” etc.
I knew I ought to have grabbed a pic of that lynx scat … it’s just a certain quality that I consider lynx-not-coyote-or-wolf. I won’t go into the gory descriptive details … And I never thought of burrows. I know of many burrows and I may guess ‘fox’ or ‘ground squirrel,’ but I’d love other suggestions.
Another set of projects I undertake (perhaps this should be a new topic) is that I use my camera’s GPS to note where I see a bird cavity in a tree and photograph that, and the other is I may casually (kind of unscientifically) measure the girth of a tree at my own chest height (here there are few trees so wide that can’t be done). However, I’ve never kept a database, and it would mean much gaping at old image sets to locate all those holes and boles, and to create those databases.