Let's Talk Annotations

Often. I have tried leaving forum posts. The iNat response is - not a problem.

There is a newbie on iNat.
You ask on screen for sex.
How many new to iNat people even know that ‘some plants have separate male and female plants’?
So they give the reasonable answer - I am a woman - WHY do you ask?!

And I have no idea how to set about explaining to them. (If you are hiking with me on our mountains I can show you Leucadendron - protea family - male and female have carefully planted themselves next to each other - male cone … and female cone)
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/186152-Leucadendron/browse_photos?order_by=created_at&term_id=9&term_value_id=11

The option should NOT be there, unless it is meaningful. iNat is plant blind.

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Not even just for newbies.
I have little to no idea what this refers to… :)

But the people who misuse it do so because they believe it is asking a question of themselves?
If this is the main misuse, then at least I don’t see this happening for insect life stages…

The only incorrectly annotated insect life stages I’ve come across have been those notated as pupa which should be larvae and vice-versa ( not always clear, and an error I have made myself ).

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What happens atm if a user uploads a lepidoptera observation with annotation larvae and then it gets bounced up to pterygota before making its way to diptera?
Is the annotation retained or lost ?

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Some plants have only female parts of flowers on one specimen and male parts on the other, e.g. buckthorn, so only females will have fruits and they need males to get that, that is the minority of plants, others either have flowers with both organs or have the separate but on one plant (like Carex), so most plants don’t need sex annotations at all.

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Should a request for adding a life stage of eggs to a phylum be made as a curator flag?

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4 posts were split to a new topic: Are there redundant observation fields, and if so, should they be merged?

What phylum is it?

Should be retained.

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Sorry just noticing this now. I’m a little off grid. I’ll have to look back and try to figure out what I was looking at. I’ll get back to you.

Hello everyone, I would be interested in seeing a new annotation under “Evidence of Presence” for animals a “Nest” (or a better word to allow a more general description) option especially for animals such as wasps, bees and birds as currently those observations don’t fall under any “Evidence for Presence” but I often see users mark them as “Tracks” or “Molt” which the observations are neither.

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apparently we are supposed to use ‘tracks’ for the other evidence

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Are we? When I looked at the definition of tracks it says “footprints in dirt or snow”. If it is to be included then would it be possible to change the definition to clarify that other things such as hair, nests, est can be included in that category .

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If you check, nest was asked to be added before, and yes, ppl shouldn’t use “tracks” for that.

Somewhere in this long thread that was said - use tracks for all the other evidence of presence.

I’m pretty sure it was said never to use tracks for something that doesn’t fit description of the field.

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Thanks, for letting me know everyone.

What about a gall, or a feeding mark? We may not be able to identify exactly what species produced it, but is a swollen gall, chewn leaf, or scratched trunk evidence?

from https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-is-evidence/470/60

Galls are available as annotation.

That was an August 2021 comment (not mine)
Gall is one of the newer annotations?

Someone has probably mentioned this and I will go through again and look at the other topics, but…

I noticed under annotations / Life Stage that there are only Adult, egg, and Juvenile for birds. But many birds, even hatching year (HY) are past the juvenile stage and are actually Immature birds. Most of the time, Juvenile is only used for birds right out of the nest and certainly not for birds in their second year (SY) or after hatching year (AHY). For example, some gulls and hawks may take more than one year to become an adult.

Can we get “Immature” added as a life stage to the list of Annotations for birds?

I’m not comfortable using Juvenile for sub-adults (although I guess I could if there is no other choice), especially for HY birds that pretty much look like adults and are getting ready to migrate, but aren’t quite adults yet.

Thank you for your consideration.
Amy

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I moved your post to this existing topic. If you search within it, you can see some previous related discussion.

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