Please help…
I got a compost heap to ID. There are no more details visible.
Is it just considered “Dicot”? Or is there ‘no evidence of an organism’?
Thank you very much.
That would be Life and Next Slide for me. There are nearly infinite possibilities of fungus, bacteria, flies, worms, etc. in a compost pile.
And the next identifier to come along should agree with Life and mark the DQA “As good as it can be.” That will move the observation to Casual and out of the Needs ID pile.
If you can identify one of the living things in the heap I’d just ID that with a comment pointing out that the photo shows a whole little ecosystem.
Eg.
The mushrooms are Napipedinae but there are also several ants, mites, moss, lichen, thrips, and fly pupae. I don’t know which organism this observation is for.
But only if it’s a really beautiful rich photo with lots of things to notice would I bother. Just because I like to encourage anyone who can take good photos of small living things. There are some talented photographers who don’t know the names of what they are photographing and that’s fine IMO.
If it is a blurry pile of stuff I think tagging it as life is the way to go.
while the vast majority of material going into a compost heap is organic, and the large majority of the things breaking it down are also organic… there is no parameter of what “species” a compost heap is. usually there will be dozens of macroscopic and thousands of microscopic organisms, a lot of which would be very difficult or impossible to identify from rotten fragments or casual phone pics.
so… sadly… no. it’s not an organism. it is a micro ecosystem that has organisms in it.
This is how I would approach it, I’d mark it as life, if I was feeling kind I’d put a comment with the ID along the lines of “This is a complex ecosystem with many organisms.” But iNat doesn’t really have the ability to use general photos like this.
I find similar things with soil biocrusts, mark as life and move on. Unless there is a “principle organism” then I leave a comment- “Biocrust, primarily visualized…Moss, or Lichen”.
Also am I correct Astra, that you are saying it could be marked as a “no evidence of organism”?
I use that for something like plastic decoy ducks, or garden flamingoes, or bait ‘fish’
Or if the compost is IDed as beetle, but you cannot see one there.
I was looking for such an option for really bad images to get them “out of the pile”.
How exactly do I do this and what does DQA stand for?
A compost heap is a community, not a single organism, and is unlikely to include any living, growing dicots.
I would argue that an observation of a compost pile, with no specific organism of focus, has little to no value in being posted to iNat and should probably be avoided. Observations are for specific organisms (and often encouraged to be individuals), and as others have mentioned a compost pile represents thousands of organisms. It’s essentially like photographing a forest and not specifying any one organism. The observation would sit in “life”, probably go to casual, and serve essentially no function to the website or biodiversity data as a whole, while eating up unnecessary server space.
If there were a website for documenting biological/natural communities (which I am in favor of!) this would be useful documentation, but iNaturalist is not that place.
If there are no organisms that can be pinpointed then a compost heap is a habitat, to me
Thank you very much for all the input and your thoughts to the topic.
It was just a blury pile (no nice details, just to document a pile). Perhaps an interesting habitat to riffle through, but not identifyable on iNaturalist.
I’ve observed a dicot growing in a compost heap: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/264911774 .
I know the questions of course, I was not aware of the name and the abbreviation. But there it is: Evidence of organism. Or not.
Got it. Thank you!