Let's Talk Annotations

Yeah, @kiwifergus, I hear you. I’m indifferent to the leaderboards too, hence not specifically advocating for that, just mentioning it. But, hey, if it motivates some people to contribute more, why not?

4 Likes

case in point re oohs and aahs on stuff I have never seen before:
https://inaturalist.org/observations/23312889

1 Like

Hi,

I’m planning to use the annotation feature for some new botany research projects I’m starting this season. Two things would make this easier/better:

  • plant phenology (which really looks like reproductive phenology) needs a vegetative option. At the moment, a plant without fruits or flowers can’t be annotated. If there was an option for ‘vegetative’, or ‘non-reproductive’ or something to that effect, we could select that. Without this option, I can imagine we’ll eventually see the same, growing, group of vegetative photos every time we repeat the same search for un-annotated photos.

  • it would be nice to allow multiple selections for plant phenology, as many species flower and fruit simultaneously

Thanks,

Tyler

6 Likes

You can already do this one:
image

7 Likes

I wanted to open this back up, because it has more applications than have been thoroughly discussed.

There are countless applications for land managers to use an alive/dead annotation (which could be added to the Life Stage annotation as a “Deceased” option), a healthy/ill annotation (New annotation under “Apparent Health”), an in-situ/proxy annotation (Under a “Presence” annotation). I think it would be appropriate to test these under Class Mammalia for starts, just look at how many mammal observations are just tracks and bones in the National Park Service. There are enormous differences in the usability of data from alive, verifiable specimens and dead, unconfirmed specimens.

4 Likes

Just wanted to add in that currently, that some folks are interpreting “bud” as “leaf bud,” as mentioned in this topic, so if even if no other stages are added, clarification would be helpful.

.

3 Likes

When I add observations or identify I would like to be clear about the Plant Phenology choices.

Attribute Plant Phenology choices: Flowering; Fruiting; Budding (in this order)

Please clarify if budding refers to leaf buds or flower buds. Could that be made clearer by adding leaf budding or flower budding to the Attribute choices?

4 Likes

My understanding is it refers only to flower buds. I agree the wording could be a bit more clear.

7 Likes

I’ve used this both for flower buffing and for leaf buds in the spring…

Definitely thought it was leaf buds for a long time. The fact that it’s probably flower buds didn’t occur to me until I saw someone here on the forum refer to it as “reproductive phenology” a few weeks ago. I think clarification is a good idea, particularly since leaf and flower buds are different stages of growth and should be categorized separately.

3 Likes

Agree! And while we are at it, if a plant observation has no reproductive phenology going on (no flower buds, flowers, or fruits), the only option for now is to make no annotations. This case can’t be distinguished from the case where the observation simply hasn’t been evaluated yet. So to be fully functional, there should probably be a default “unknown” value, plus additional phenologic stages to select from such as seedling, vegetative, dormant, senescent, etc.

7 Likes

Very true, and I absolutely agree that we need more options for plant phenology. Since that had been well established in the annotations discussion, I refrained from mentioning here initially to keep this thread on-topic

4 Likes

6/19/19 Thank you for the annotation discussion link, that lead me to the annotations guide, all helpful.

Plant Phenology Annotations should be kept clean and simple to reduce confusion (& fuzzy data) by all observers and produce a solid record. Because the information records directly to the Species Site graphics for plant phenology it should be clear and accurate. I think initially the clarification between leaf and flower buds would be the best addition (maybe just have flower buds so the focus could be on reproductive phenology) with the default as “not recorded” rather than “unknow”. If observers take photos of only leaves for id posting there also maybe flowers so reproductive phenology is “not recorded” . If other plant phenology additions are considered I recommend reviewing the US National Phenology Network/Nature’s Notebook (NPN) site phenology list to have some consistency across Citizen Science sites. The NPN site is not really user friendly and I can’t easily find a template for plant phenology choices that is why I am not including a link.

Would it be helpful for observers to be reminded about recording the phenology when they are submitting their observations with a box that says “life sage” and then drop down to the choices? Maybe I have missed that in my own submission?

Why is there both a Seasonality graph and a Phenology graph?

2 Likes

In Juniperus, it seems to me dioecious vs monoecious is useful/interesting.
E.g., descriptions say J. grandis is something like 90% dioecious.
in more that 300 grandis observations, I have found only 1 monoecious.
The characteristic helps distinguish some adjacent species.

@loarie, Scott, would it be “easily” possible to do bulk annotations, somewhat similar to the way one can bulk add observations to project? It frankly takes too long, even with shortcuts, to annotate each one using the Identify module.

I’m also very interested in getting adults separated from larva in Lepidoptera. While I’m not a pro it would be pretty easy for anyone to separate lep images.

Thanks,
Monica

2 Likes

I would really love to see various sorts of “triage” interfaces like that. Life stage edits and Unknown/Life categorizations come to mind. If I had a stripped-down hot-key-enabled version of the ID interface — especially one that worked on mobile— I’d probably do things like that in spare moments instead of playing games on my phone!

6 Likes

“Associated plant” and “Associated animal” would be really useful.

A companion annotation category, “Type of association/interaction,” could utilize kiwifergus’s excellent list posted at https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/observation-field-standardization-wiki/380/12 Mar 31

What would really, tremendously help here would be computerized importation of associated plant/animal species data from the tangle of observation fields that include a species/genus/family name of a plant or animal.

It might be best to add the interaction(s) manually. Why? Well, I currently add “nectar plant” to my Bay Area pollinator observations even when the associated plant does not produce nectar. I do this to help the coordinator of the “Backyard Pollinators Bay Area” project. The project started out using the pre-existing “nectar plant” observation field for all pollinator interactions with plants. It has too many observations done this way to switch.

An automated way to add the “nectar plant” species to an “associated plant” Annotations field would probably be very welcome to that project’s coordinator.

2 Likes

So, shoudl we change the title “Plant phenology” to “Flowering Phenology”?

3 Likes

Yes, and add another option like “None Visible or Not Recorded”, which covers the other major issue with this annotation mentioned above: vegetative specimens and observations that just show leaves (which may be flowering, or not) are left to perpetually hang without an annotation.

6 Likes

Ideally none could be separated from unknown somehow to designate when it wasn’t blooming.

1 Like