So in 2017, iNaturalist introduced annotations, which is a way to add metadata to an observation in an iNaturalist-controlled way rather than relying on the free-for-all that is observation fields. We wanted to start out with some basic ones, such as Sex and Life Stage, as well as Plant Phenology (which, I know, many botanists have argued should be Flowering Phenology) and there were many other requests, but the subject died down without anything else being added by iNat, aside from some taxonomic tweaks.
Iād like to revive that discussion here and see if we can add at least a few more annotations to iNaturalist and reduce some observation field confusion. So please reply with a request, if you have one. It would be best to define the annotation, possible values, and which taxa it would be applicable to.
Please keep the following in mind:
Annotations should be attributes that can be independently determined from an image or sound and are useful in the places where we use annotations, eg the taxon page charts and the taxon page photo browser.
We want to restrict annotations to qualitative values, so annotations with numerical values will not be added. Values should not be arbitrary, either.
These are not photo-level annotations, so the annotation should describe the observation as a whole.
In general Iād prefer that the annotation not be of very niche use but can be used for a good number of observations.
We canāt promise your suggestion will be added, especially until we implement a user interface that will not display15 annotations on an observationās page all at once.
Alive/dead could be useful.
āPresent at the momentā field should probably be limited to animals. Things like toasted annual plants could be referred to as ādeadā instead.
Iād love to see something to track leaf phenology, which is really important for plants both in cold areas like Vermont and in areas with dry seasons such as coastal California. However, that gets tricky because evergreen versus deciduous is something that comes down to genus level - oaks for instance have many evergreen and many deciduous species, and offering the pulldown for evergreen species may just confuse people.
It would be neat to have an annotation to tag other species visible in a photo but that may be too confusing if you also have people copying the photosā¦ could already be recorded.
Do you have annotations for those, Jeremy? Those are values, but need an annotation heading, eg āLife Stageā has the values egg, larva, nymph, adult, etc.
For bryophytes, an annotation indicating whether there are sporophytes present or not would be just as useful as flowering phenology is. There isnāt any issue with multiple fields since I am currently the only person recording such information in fields [Sporophytes present], but if it was made into an annotation I would probably start adding it for every observation I look at and it would also be very helpful when viewing photos.
I think it would be best to add Plant Phenology to them with just the Fruiting value available, but you could also add a new value āSporophyteā. If Plant Phenology cannot be used without including flowering and budding, then a new annotation called Sporophytes with the lone value Present would work.
I would really, really like to be able to add annotations during upload!
I would like to be able to choose more than one Life Stage per ob (like one can with Plant Phenology). Say the photo is of a moth laying eggs - I would like to be able to add both annotations Adult and Egg.
And I would like to be able to add more than one Sex annotation to a single ob (e.g. ob is of a mating pair). Also, we need more options for Sex. I know this was discussed somewhere else so I wonāt go into it here.
I donāt know if itās just my laidback rural bandwidth, but annotations take ages to ātakeā, and I have to wait for the spinning wheel to finish before I can do anything else on the page (like add the ob to a project). Sometimes I even have to refresh the page - sometimes the annotation has recorded and sometimes it hasnāt and I have to do it again.
We would please like our field āHabitat (s Afr)ā to display on the Taxon Page, alongside Seasonality, History and Life Stage on southern African observations.
An explodable pie diagram of the different habitats.
The field is here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/7498
It has over 360 000 entries for our 500k observations, so is quite comprehensive and a very useful summary of taxon habitat requirements.
It would be cool to have it as a southern African annotation too. But I imagine that expanding it to the rest of the world will be rather overambitious. Still we would love it for our community.
similarly i would love to have the ānatural communityā field as an annotation but you usually canāt tell from a photo and it sounds like they are only adding annotations that can be verified with the photo.
I think it would be really neat if users could choose to have certain fields or annotations always show up on every observaton, but it might be too similar to the āfield updateā that we arenāt going to get soā¦
Upon further thought, I think a lot of this could be covered in one annotation: āType of Evidenceā. Some possible options:
Photo of a living organism
Photo of a dead organism
Photo of tracks - animals only
Photo of fur/feathers/shed skin/etc - for mammals/birds/reptiles/etc.
Photo of scat/excrement - animals only
Recording of sounds made by organism
Animated photo of living organism - thereās a project which manually collects these
Illustration/sketch of organism
Photo of a photo or screen
Iām not sure if Iām trying to put too many things in this category or not. I think these are mutually exclusiveā¦
Thereās the issue of observations with multiple types of evidence, but we already deal with that in observations that have, e.g., both a male and female in the same photo. Like those, this annotation would be used for observations that have only one type of evidence.
Iām probably missing a bunch of possibilities for plants.
Edit: Iām definitely mixing up two things above, what was recorded, and how it was recorded.
I agree with @karoopixie, the ability to add annotation during the upload process would be a huge help. I try to use annotations as much as possible because I thinking they add a lot of value to observations, but going back through batches of observations after upload to add annotations is a pain.
This could already exist/ be covered in an observation field I donāt know aboutā¦I have observations depicting a ākill siteā or likely predator/prey encounter which have tracks, blood, feathers or fur, sometimes scat, usually without the animal, would this also be something that could be a part of evidence type or is this a whole other thing? I like the āType of Evidenceā idea.
if the app is changed so annotations can be added, please donāt make it a default part of the process of taking an observation. That would be unacceptably slow for those of us who use the app a lot.
For shelled mollusks, it would be very useful to record whether the photo is of a dead empty shell, a washed-up but intact mollusk (perhaps dead, moribund or soon to be so) or a live organism in situ. It would also be good to be able to say that the dead empty shell is long-dead, which is sometimes apparent from the appearance of the shell.
This should be fairly easy to do. Iāll try and diagram out a Plant Phenology hierarchy, also taking into account @boutelouaās suggestion.
Remember that an observation on iNat is the record of an encounter between the observer and an individual organism at a specific time and place, so technically one cannot choose more than one life stage or sex per observation. I think this is a case where Observation Fields like Copulating are working fine.
I donāt think we will do this for observation fields, but perhaps some sort of visualization like this can be part of your feature request.
I like this idea, although I donāt think photo or sound are needed, just the type of evidence.
Playing devilās advocate here, I find it very easy and quick to annotate my observations in the Identify tool right after I upload them, now that Iāve gotten into the habit. Iāve bookmarked https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?reviewed=true&quality_grade=needs_id%2Cresearch&user_id=tiwane and this shows me all of my own observations Iāve reviewed (ie observations to which Iāve added an ID), with the latest ones first. Then itās just a matter or going through them. That URL should work for anyone, just replace ātiwaneā with your own username.
Now, I do have pretty good internet speeds at home, so maybe the Identify page doesnāt work as well for others, but to me the integrated keyboard shortcuts make it much quicker than the upload page would be.
BTW, @eraskin, I did finally add Sex as an annotation for mollusks. So sorry for the waaaaay too long delay.
In cases of very small organisms, like some annual plants for example, itās nigh impossible NOT to record an encounter with multiple organisms, no matter how far in one zooms. If there is mixture of flowering and fruiting individuals (of the species being identified) in the resulting mass-capture, I think that is still good information to record.
I dont know if this is exclusively true. Often it is āan encounter between the observer and a āpopulation or group of organismsā at a specific time and place ā¦ā Think of a school of fish, or a duck family crossing a road. Would it really be acceptable for me to put each fish in the school, or each member of the duck family (mum, dad and 20 ducklings), as separate observations? Or 200 observations of aphids on a branch?
1. What is an observation?
An observation records an encounter with an individual organism at a particular time and location. This includes encounters with signs of organisms like tracks, nests, or things that just died.
So yes, thereās nothing strictly prohibiting adding 200 observations of aphids on a branch, but for most people thatās probably not a very meaningful/interesting way to use iNat.
*looks like when you quote quoted text, it attributes the wrong person
But that is exactly my point. When I put an observation of Milkweed Aphids on a branch, it is about the population of aphids, not Jane (the 174th one on the branch from the left).
So whereas it is acceptable for me to add observations for each of Annette, Antioniette, Barbie, Bungie, Cinderella, Clara, Charlie ā¦ etc. etc., I wont: I will only add one for all of the aphids - the population or family.
So the definition should be altered to make it clear that this is equally acceptable practice (or perhaps even more desirable than adding Annette ā¦).
yeah i agree on this one. If there are both male and female aphids on the stick, i donāt see any advantage in assigning the observation to one specific aphid and donāt understand the downside of just marking both. It gets even weirder with plants, where oftentime things reproduce clonally or are connected underground and without genetic work itās literally unknowable sometimes, and even still the boundary of āindividualā is blurred. Iād rather have the option to choose more than one.