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 o…

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 it’s not just been caught, such as fish or a raccoon.

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, it’s 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?

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 there’s no easy way to get annotation data out of iNat, while IDs definitely help get observations to RG and onto GBIF where rese…

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.

“Clearly a pet” is captive/cultivated. If you aren’t sure, just ask the observer.

I add plant phenology and lepidoptera life stage quite often - even if I can’t 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 I’m learning. …

Is this preferred or not?

General

marina_gorbunova May 12, 2021, 3:53pm 6

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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How often do you mark plants as ‘Not Wild’ when IDing? General	57	1131	October 3, 2024
Reviewing etiquette with house and yard plants? General question	8	1322	July 19, 2019
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Is this preferred or not?

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