Is there a way to have a project like this

General
1

A project I had in mind for my kids and I to work on was looking at Saguaro distribution here in the American Southwest, to see how they vary by their height (0-50 years old), overall health, and age (as indicated by branching) over the landscape. We travel around out in nature, and the Saguaro’s are the desert’s old growth forest.

Let’s say we are browsing a photo of a mesquite tree, and we see a saguaro lurking in the distance. The observation was not the Saguaro. Can we derive / separate it from an existing observation? If I understand the rules, we can’t, unless we were there and took the photo’s ourselves. But what if it wasn’t an “observation” per se?

There are plenty of photographs in inaturalist to work from. But how to make it work? I’m sure some others have had a similar idea. I would like for them to be able to extract the geocoords and elevation, pick a representative (perhaps the largest, and the smallest?) from that observation, and enter attributes such as a size category, the number of arms, damage (rot / droop, gunfire, lightning). That sort of thing.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

I have a feeling this is out of scope for inaturalist and would need to be done excel style, but getting little kiddos to tinker with that is just begging for trouble.

2

If it’s your own observation you can hit ‘duplicate’ in the pull down menu on the ‘edit’ button in he upper right (if you’re using the browser interface)… there is a similar option on mobile, but I rarely ever use the mobile app in any depth.

Once you duplicate the observation add an ID and it’s often a good idea to add a note explaining what it is the observation is of so others don’t get confused.

If it’s someone else’s observation all you can do is ask them to duplicate their observation, and if they do you can then add an ID to their observation.