Would / do people prefer for when identifying to annotate and answer the questions it gives you? I noticed that it doesnt seem that alot of people do it but it seemed really helpful for keeping track of what stage / gender the animal / plant was. (Also when I see an observation of a plant in a pot or an animal in a box should I mark it as cultivated / captive?
Annotations are helpful for researchers, but not required.
All cultivated plants (in a pot, garden, etc) should be marked as captive/cultivated, as well as captive animals, yes. For animals though, make sure that you know itās not just been caught, such as fish or a raccoon.
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So like if its a fish in a container or like an animal but its clearly a pet it should be captive / cultivated? What about ones that are in a container but you arent sure if it was caught or if it was raised in captivity?
Fish in container can be just a caught fish, you can look up multiple treads here on forum dedicated to what captive is and what is not.
If you can/want annotate, itās always a good thing, but if you want to help people with ids, adding annotations will slow you a lot.
It doesnt bother me annotating, and Im fine with taking time because it allows me to review if I need to. Do you think you could give me a link to any of the threads or would it be too much to ask?
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Probably this https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/wild-or-cultivated-how-to-tell/19627 and worth checking links it has under the main post.
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I will thank you
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I would say that if you are interested in helping researchers specifically, more IDs helps more than more annotations (sorry for all the "more"s). The main reason is that thereās no easy way to get annotation data out of iNat, while IDs definitely help get observations to RG and onto GBIF where researchers are most likely to use them.
Also, I think casual users value id help more than people adding annotations to their observations (which they may not even notice), so that can encourage new users.
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Oh ok so I should just focus more on the identifying part?
Identifications are definitely more helpful, annotations are useful for people who want to search specifically for a certain sex or life stage.
āClearly a petā is captive/cultivated. If you arenāt sure, just ask the observer.
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I add plant phenology and lepidoptera life stage quite often - even if I canāt add an ID. I can do this for many species with very little knowledge (an adult butterfly usually looks very different from a caterpillar even without any expertise), so I like that I can do something while Iām learning.
I also use the annotations as filters. It is sometimes helpful when I am trying to confirm the few things I can ID to be able to filter the pictures (I think this is the fruit of x, so I can look at just pictures of it in the fruiting stage to double check whereas I would have to search through all the pictures trying to find fruit otherwise). Iāve noticed some identifiers specialize in caterpillars so by adding ālarvaā they can more easily find those to ID.
I also like to look at the phenology graphs to see when a flower I like is likely to start blooming in my area. This is something someone with lots of experience would know already, but for me it is helpful.
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I also annotate where it seems useful ā¦ Lep ā¦ larva ā¦ and then my notifications tell me more.
Today I used Flower budding to sort out iNat photos to confirm that my red mystery flower, was simply a familiar one but in bud. Without some annotations I couldnāt do that!
Fruiting is also useful. Flowering not so much, since that is where the bulk of the photos is anyway.
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From my understanding, annotating moth stages (like adult) also helps the AI form a better understanding of appearance. If I am wrong about this, would someone please correct me?
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I typically only do annotations for things where juvenile/larva vs adult or male vs female are very different looking AND for deceased mammals, birds, and herps. Some people want to be able to filter out dead animals because they donāt want to see them.
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My garden has plenty of plants that are not cultivated. I even have some pots that had a cultivated plant in but now have non-cultivated plants in.
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Okay, we can be nitpicky: any plant in a pot is captive.
You canāt assume that. As I said, I have a few plants in pots that I didnāt grow and I donāt cultivate. They are not cultivated.
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I didnāt say cultivated, I said captive :)
Edit: If you repot something, Iād consider that captive no matter what. https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#captive
Also, the Data Quality Assessment requires assumptions. Itās a vote based on the available evidence. If there is a bird that looks dead to me and alive to you, we both can assume weāre correct, until proved incorrect.