I’ve annotated a few thousand eastern United States Lepidoptera and encountered these unfulfilled needs from annotations:
- A way to indicate that an annotation cannot be determined from the evidence in the observation. This could be as simple as adding a value to an annotation category, like Life Stage: Indeterminate. Observations with this value should be removed from the searches for observations without the annotation.
Whenever I search for lep observations without a life stage annotation, I see the same dozens of bagworm moth bags that lack sufficient info about life stage at the time of the observation. And the next time, I have to sift through them all again. There is no way to say “life stage cannot be determined”, so no life stage can be applied, but then there is no way to eliminate these from the search results for “without life stage annotation”.
- A way to indicate that an observation should be excluded from the life stage seasonality plots. The common case I encounter is a photo of an intact butterfly wing without the rest of the butterfly. Another is a dead but intact moth engulfed in a fungus. Clearly these are Life Stage = Adult, but the observation should not be part of the Adult life stage seasonality plot because the organism is not clearly alive on the observation date. Perhaps a new annotation of the alive/dead/indeterminate variety would allow these to be flagged, and the relevant seasonality plots would be tuned to ignore anything dead or indeterminate.