i had recently observed complex scene. big family of pheasants, being attacked by pies. those pies also beeing interested in dead baby dear and fighting with ravens. there is also mother of dead baby dear coming to the scene. i found it not fitting inat single specimen observations, and didnt want to simplify photo to single specimen and lost all other informations. there were other cases like different birds fighting, birds feeding babies, mating etc.
is there somewhere place that is interested in more complex observations then single specimen?
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It’s not a perfect solution, but I sometimes upload all pertinent photos into one observation, duplicate it, edit the duplicates so that each one doesn’t include any photos that lack the species it will focus on, identify each, and then connect all the observations using notes, links, and observation fields like “Associated observation” or “Plant association” etc. There are a lot of options for adding more information about interacting organisms if you use observation fields.
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Yes, you can duplicate an observation and create as many observations from the same picture or set of pictures that you want with an ID for each species (as long as that species is present in all pics).
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not really into creating multiple observations from one photo. rather adding more informations to observation. adding other species, describing what is going on - fighting, hunting, mating, feeding etc
Interspecies interactions are a valid subject.
There are some limitations.
For me these represent a photographic challenge, not an obstacle.
- Can’t upload videos. (understandable, it would chew up storage space)
- Observation is for a single taxa. This is just how the iNat data is structured.
You could add one observation per taxa with the most relevant photos:
Pheasants, being attacked by magpies
Magpies, attacking pheasants
Feeding babies is a single taxa observation unless you want to get the food identified.
You can also add the offspring separate with annotations, that’s always helpful.
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The pattern I tend to follow (even for scenes that aren’t very complex) is that I take a crop of the species I’m “observing” for the first image and then for subsequent images in the observation I include the full scene.
I also do this for plants oftentimes, because having the context that it’s growing in can be meaningful for identification but also for educational / nature journaling purposes.
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feeding babies is single taxa but multiple specimens, different life stage adult/juvenile, could be diferent sex male/female. wouls be good to have all that recorded in single observation
There are several projects which aim to collect specific types of “complex observations”, or scenes, for example Multiple Life Stages or Interspecific bird interactions. There’s a lot on predators as well. A lot of these projects have custom notes that can allow you to add formatted details to one observation, like the species it’s interacting with, etc.
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As noted,
but observations are actually even more “restrictive” than that.
iNat’s Help page for observations notes:
" Observations are the basic units of iNaturalist. An observation records an encounter with an individual organism, or recent evidence of an organism, at a particular time and location." (Bolding on the original webpage)
So what you appear to be looking for (an observation for multiple individuals and taxa all at once) isn’t something that iNat’s structure can accommodate. The strategies listed above are likely the best approaches within that structure to approximate what you are looking for.
You could also go in a different direction and do something like write up a journal post about your observation explaining all the different details you observed and interactions you witnessed. You could then link to observations for the individual organisms. In my opinion, something like this might be more integrative for complex scenarios which are difficult fits for a database like iNat.
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Since most of the animals in your scene are birds, I will add that very recently Ebird added a series of items to checklists specifically aimed at this. If you use (Or want to try) Ebird, you can make a checklist of every bird species you saw in that area, and upload the pictures of the scene to the “Habitat/Soundscape” section (tagging each species involved), pictures of the deer to the “Other Animals” section, and also upload the pictures that have a focal species to that specific species.
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I’ll sometimes duplicate and edit the photo before uploading, highlighting the portion relevant for that specific observation.
Like these:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/147014845
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/147014846
Or like this:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/110937294
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/110937291
It eliminates the confusion of simply duplicating an observation, like happened here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/125176638
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/125176527
People often don’t bother to read or pay attention to the notes, so for clarity it’s best to include some sort of visual guide in the image itself. It would be nice if iNat had an option to do this while uploading, but that would add more complexity to things.
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You might post your question also here https://github.com/globalbioticinteractions/
that was probably already discussed, im jusy not very aware of things on iNat, but how about additional atributes? now there is 4 sex/age/observation type/dead or alive. why it cant be use for more informations? like additional specimens/ types of interreaction/ situation
These are already there. Some observation fields are used by globalinteractions use some of them. E..g eaten by: https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/879
https://github.com/globalbioticinteractions/inaturalist/blob/main/interaction_types_mapping.csv
https://github.com/globalbioticinteractions/inaturalist/blob/main/interaction_types.csv?plain=1
i mean on inaturalist
The reference was to observation fields on iNat https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields
Some of these fields (those that accept a taxon as a value) have been mapped into standard types of interactions between organisms and are used by other databases (e.g. https://www.globalbioticinteractions.org/)
I assume that by “attributes” you are referring to annotations. Annotations are intended to record basic, standardized attributes that apply to a large variety of taxa and refer to the characteristics of the subject of the observation (which iNat defines as a specific individual at a particular point in time).
So number of specimens or types of interaction would be outside the scope of annotations.
You can read more about annotations and the criteria for suggested additions here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lets-talk-annotations/627
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In the EXcel sheet is a list with 176 items like https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/879
You can also describe what’s going on in your photo. (In addition to filling out observation fields.)
i dont really know observation fields. are they on android app?
I don’t use android, so can’t say. Basically, it doesn’t matter if you fill out observation fields or not. Describing behaviors or habitats, etc., can be useful. The fields (available on the website) can do that in a standardized way, but they’re not required.