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. I’d 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 I’d prefer that the annotation not be of very niche use but can be used for a good number of observations. We can’t promise your suggestion will be added, especially until we implement a user interface that will not display15 annotations on an observation’s page all at once.

It is not possible to change/delete annotations on observations that aren’t your own, only to up and downvote. You can see some discussions of this elsewhere on the forum.

Would you be comfortable with the breakdown “female” / “worker” / “male” as options under the “sex” annotation for all of Vespinae? I want to save the iNat staff the extra work it would take to add different annotation options for every species.

Agreed, there should be a distinction between “ripe” and “unripe/developing” fruits (though obviously both can be present at the same time).

What you claimed didn’t seem quite right to me, so I did some more research. The term “queen” is frequently used by Vespid researchers to refer to female obligate social parasites throughout the literature, most notably in Akre R.D. et al. (1981), which served as the definitive text on American Vespinae for several decades. It makes sense to use the word “queen” in this context, because even though obligate social parasites do not produce workers themselves, they adopt the role as the dominant reproductive entity in the colony. They are able to mate and the workers of the colony are not.

I don’t think an extra annotation value should be added (for obvious reasons I hope!), but here is a type of evidence I have not yet seen and does not fit any of the current categories - the defensive fluid produced by a mole cricket

[image] bonesigh: I roughly estimate It’s only applicable to at most few thousand observations. I just wanted to say that I’ve already passed 2,000 fragments! https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/seashell-fragments To be fair, I’ve also been including crustacean and echinoderm fragments, however, I am also acutely aware that they are all concentrated on the US Atlantic and Gulf Coast which is the only place I have expertise in. Only a couple hundred are in Europe and other areas which means I have a lot of work to do!

[image] ribes2018: 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? Vegetative growth is an important phenology stage, please to narrow to just reproductive phenology annotations

Sorry if this has already been mentioned (I confess I haven’t read the whole of this very long thread). For a few days now, the plant annotations have not been translated into French : [image] Is it possible to fix this? (yes, it’s true, the French aren’t very good at foreign languages: thank you for them/me!) I’m happy to contribute to the translation if someone tells me where to do it :smiley:

yikes, 670 posts…! I would like to see a tool for highlighting identifying features, not just for human’s identification, but also to help direct the algorithm. so for example plants have stems that are smooth, stems that have a polygonal profile, stems that are hairy; leaf margins that are smooth, lobed, toothed… etc if you’ve ever submitted feedback to Google about an app, then you’ve probably experienced an option to upload a screenshot and given a chance to highlight what specifically you want the Devs to look at. a similar method was used by a citizen science project that I participated in, where the idea was that the citizen scientist would look at images and then highlight the items of interest the project was looking for. so in addition to adding drop-down options to choose from these common identifying characteristics, there should be a tool to use this highlighting layer to highlight exactly where on the photo this identifying characteristic is. and FYI the Wikipedia entry excerpts are pretty useless for identification. sure I could do a Google search about the differences between two similar species, to confirm which variety I’m looking at, but when there’s 16 different options that becomes pretty tedious, whereas if I’m using the “compare” feature, it would go a lot faster if I knew what features to look for because it would highlight them on the image for example for sassafras there are two options, wild sarsaparilla and bristly sarsaparilla… but, not being familiar, and only having one example of the two in front of me, I’m kind of left to guess about the “bristly” adjective… nothing about the plant I’m looking at looks particularly bristly, but maybe refers to something more subtle like the flowers or the appearance of the leaf margins both of which are toothed. also having this feature would incentivized taking photos of these features, because you can’t highlight it if you don’t take a photo of it. this would also help the algorithm on some of the blurrier photos. I remember suggesting to someone that they upload non blurry photos, and they replied “you can clearly tell because of the white patches on the shoulders” that doesn’t help the algorithm though, and it doesn’t help anybody who doesn’t already know that white patches on the shoulders are the differentiator… all I could see was a bird-shaped blob against the blue sky. edit: I should also point out (though I probably don’t need to) that most people are not going to go to the effort of highlighting all of the characteristics, instead they’re going to shortcut by only listing the most differentiating.

Let's Talk Annotations

General

carrieseltzer June 20, 2024, 6:08pm 706

Heads up, we’ve just released some updates to annotations for angiosperms and vascular plants. Many thanks to everyone who left comments in this thread that informed the updates.

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Annotations that do not fit General	26	3529	February 9, 2020
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Let's Talk Annotations

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