There’s a project for those: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/never-home-alone-the-wild-life-of-homes
2 species at once were discussed, hope somebody else remembers the topic and will link it to you.
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You can filter by projects, too. And I think obs are much more likely to be added to a project for indoor observations than to have been annotated as such.
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I am not sure how it would help. There is a big difference between a firebrat living permanently in a boiler room vs. a moth that got confused and made its way to an upstairs bedroom looking in vain for a way out.
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I cannot find if this is discussed or not?
Why is there not an age annotation for plants? Animals have it, but if you identify something as a plant then you cannot label it as:
seed, seedling, juvenile, adult, coppice, dead
(distinctions are: seeds (inclusive: i.e. fruit, propagules), seedlings must have seed leaves, juveniles no longer have seed leaves, but have not yet flowered, coppice is regeneration after a catastrophic event (but of course, being a plant, can be whole organism or just a branch), and dead is a skeleton or remains other than seeds).
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I’ve been away from this discussion, but would like to add my support to @annkatrinrose for having a “hermaphrodite” sex designation. A specific use case: Individuals of our local Western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis) trees can be dioecious (male or female) or monoecious (both). I’ve been considering a survey to see how common each type is in different habitats, and possibly following trees over time to see if they change (someone may know, but I don’t). Having the correct sex options on iNat would greatly simplify that.
I’m suggesting “hermaphrodite” instead of “bisexual” because it is the one term that seems to be used across kingdoms for organisms with both types of reproductive organs. For plants, “bisexual” is commonly used for individual flowers rather than whole organisms, plus it has behavioral connotations for humans.
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The options for the sex annotation on plant observations are gendered as Female or Male.
Is there a reason it wouldn’t be equivalent to display Pistillate or Staminate instead?
It would be equivalent; you can make a #feature-requests if you feel that it’s super important. Personally, I think female/male works just as fine.
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Agreed that it would essentially be equivalent. I think male and female here would be preferred because they’d be more understandable to most users of the site.
Many people without botanical experience would be less likely to know what those terms mean or how to use them which might decrease participation. It could also be an issue for non-English language users who would be more familiar with male and female as terms which would be easier to translate.
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Also, while I am hardly an expert in plants, wouldn’t referring to stamens and pistils only really be applicable to angiosperms? There are plenty of plants that don’t have these organs, limiting the usefulness of these terms.
And more broadly, I would argue that gender isn’t really something that plants have (at not least in the way we use the term for humans). Here, male and female would be referring to sex (not gender), though both terms/ideas are certainly constructs to some degree.
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Yes, certainly not appropriate, for example, for gymnosperms. I would favor using a single set of terms that work across all kingdoms that can reproduce sexually, so as not to confuse non-experts.
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Getting into the conversation late here, but it doesn’t seem possible to annotate on the iOS app. DAm I missing something? Or anything in the works for that?
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The most valuable annotation for migrating species or species which can travel long distances is a breeding index.
For birds, the norm (at least in some parts of the world such as Europe) is to associate a breeding index [Non-breeding, Possible breeding, Probable breeding, Confirmed breeding] to each observation, based on the following objective criteria. Experimented birdwatchers/ornithologists are familiar with this system.
It would be great if inaturalist could implement a breeding index in the Annotations fields for bird observations. I know that they are many observation fields related to bird breeding (see for instance: https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/6215), but none is widely used and they are in competition with one another. Furthermore, this information is not centralized nor used by inaturalist.
This methodology is so standard and robust that it really deserves to be available as a simple Annotations field listing the 4 categories (with a link explaining the objective criteria for each category).
Then the map of all taxa included in “Birds (Class Aves)” could be colored in the following manner:
- Shade of blue: only Non-breeding or unlabeled observations in the square
- Shade of yellow: at least one possible or probable breeding in the square
- Shade of orange at least one confirmed breeding in the square
- Shade of purple/pink: all observation in the square are labeled as introduced (should be applied to all organisms not only birds, furthermore this information is already available)
This way one could in a single glance see where is the breeding range, the wintering/migrating range, or where the species has been introduced.
This could also be applicable (with some careful definition of the criteria) to other species traveling long distances: Sea turtles, migrating insects, Mangrove trees, etc.
Thank you in advance for your opinion,
Naturalist
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The Sexual annotation only offers male and female where as many of the bryophytes will have male and females on same plant or gemme or even all 3 at once. I think this needs to be changed to allow additional selections including asexual.
as for Lichens, maybe adding a section option of "isidia, soredia or apothecia, maybe even pycnidia and add additional lichenocolous invasion.
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the following is related to plant host or name of associated plant → i recommend duplicating the observation and creating separate observations for the 2+species. Then add an observation field for AssociatedTaxa following the DwC definition: https://dwc.tdwg.org/terms/#dwc:associatedTaxa.
Here is the link to the iNat obs field: https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/10355
(GBIF uses DwC terms. I highly recommend using these terms whenever possible instead of making up new fields for iNat projects - each DwC term is defined and recognized internationally by the global aggregators and by local data managers.)
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I’ve been wondering if it would be worthwhile (or even possible) to add a ‘pinned/spread’ annotation to the alive/dead selection for moths. A spread moth shows details of the hindwing which may be useful in identification. It’s a bit specific for the overall purpose of iNat, but I just thought I’d throw it out there.
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@mamestraconfigurata just a bookkeeping note here, I added your submitted feature request to this topic instead, which is where staff want all annotation-related suggestions posted for now.
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Thanks. It’s a long shot in the great scheme of things, but it occurred to me a couple of days ago, and thought I would ask!
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Always worth asking! It occurs to me that this might work better as an “evidence type” annotation than as an addition to alive/dead.
Yes. That makes sense. Only identifiers might want this feature.
Just returning to this conversation to make another case for adding life cycle stage or generation (sporophyte/gametophyte) annotation to non-vascular plants at least (bryophytes: mosses, liverworts, hornworts).
In this group of plants, the presence of sporophytes is particularly useful for identification for two reasons. The first is based on the anatomy of the capsule. Pretty much all botany textbooks I’ve ever looked at tell you that you can distinguish the different classes of mosses by looking at their capsules and spore dispersal mechanisms. So a good picture of a sporophyte capsule can help with ID or at least narrowing down to a class or particular group of mosses, for example.
The second reason is based on timing. I have recently tried to key out a couple of mosses and frequently encountered “fruiting time” as a distinguishing character - aka which months of the year do they show sporophytes. As an example, one couplet of the key I looked at for Bryum was “synoicous, fruiting in late summer and autumn” vs. “dioicous, fruiting in summer.” It might be interesting to see if these bryophyte fruiting times are e.g. affected by climate change in the same way as flowering times in the flowering plants.
Therefore, including an annotation for sporophyte/gametophyte could add value to iNaturalist in several ways:
- It would add data about seasonal “fruiting times” to that species’ account similar to phenology for flowering plants. This could potentially serve as a basis for research projects, as well as a distinguishing feature between species with different seasonality.
- It would enable knowledgeable identifiers to focus on bryophyte observations containing sporophyte images, and allow the creation of projects focused on sporophytes. That might assist with increasing the number of bryophyte IDs on iNaturalist.
One thing to note here is that sporophyte/gametophyte are NOT sex annotations. It is possible to have both male and female sporophytes (although those are more common in the seed plants), as well as male and female gametophytes (and a lot of bisexual ones in the bryophytes). I think sporophyte/gametophyte would work best as an equivalent of phenology annotation with the possibility to select both sporophyte and gametophyte, similar to being able to select e.g. both budding and flowering. Both generations can definitely be present at the same time, it’s not an either/or case.
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