This would be useful, and if they proceed with it there is a field “Specimen” Y/N that is currently used by some. The should easily overlap with “pinned/spread” and could be used to populate the annotation.
Hi everyone, linguist here.
I would love to see iNaturalist incorporate the linguistic documentation agenda into their tool. I know there are custom fields for “common name in local language” and “local language used for common name”, but this would be a much more useful field if you designed it as a separate datapoint, with each datapoint containing three fields:
- dropdown list for language (linked to a database like ethnologue.com which has ISO-639-3 codes for all known languages)
- specific name
- generic name
A given observation could then have data for multiple local languages; commenters could also add this data to other’s observations, so that you could (for example) have a native speaker go through a list of observation and enter the data for their language.
With these features, you could quickly build a database of common names from many many languages (of special importance, minority or endangered languages), plus get a simple picture of local taxonomy (because of the generic specific fields).
Here is how I envision it looking on the platform:
Thanks!
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Common names should be added under taxon, why having a field and a separate window for that?
You may find this thread interesting?
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/select-language-for-common-names/5430
Hi there, I didn’t know that you could add common names in the species profile. That is really helpful thank you.
What I was envisioning was something that linguistic fieldworkers could use: so for example without knowing what a particular species is they could make an observation and record the local language name. Later, with the help of others on inaturalist, they could identify the species and then the common name would be added to the database.
I like what I am seeing under the taxonomy list, however I think it would be great to have the “lexicon” field linked to language codes like those of ethnologue or glottolog.
Thanks
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This request has been brought up several times, and in fact @tiwane seemed to be not too averse to implement this. As a matter of fact, just today I was considering to ask for an update about this, so your post was timed well :)
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Re: Hymenoptera, agreed. Also sex–I’ve been adding pairs to “Mating bees” and just discovered “copulation” here. Was hoping to just click a “both” option, but we also have gynandromorphs where an insect is half male and half female looking divided down the center. I’ve no idea how common this is or if it happens across other creatures.
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It’s fairly rare but can happen to any animal as far as I know. There have certainly been reports of gynandromorph birds.
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Could the “Cannot be determined” option for Life Stage be added soon? Without this option, the life-stage-indeterminate records in “without Life Stage” searches remain unaddressable and continue to pile up in the Identify page when trying to annotate life stages of newer records.
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You can use the “No, it’s as good as it can be” checkbox to bump a genus-level observation to RG and to make clear that you don’t think the ID can be improved from the current observation data.
I think options like “poor technical quality” and “uninformative angle” are likely to discourage some users and they are a bit subjective. If there is a need for an annotation that gives that information, something more general like “insufficient data” is probably more all-user friendly.
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I wonder if “possible hybrid” would be better as an annotation or in the Data Quality Assessment at the bottom? I 100% agree that parsing comments is not something anyone wants to do unless they’re desperate.
There are currently a number of observation fields for hybrid, and there are always interesting discussions when hybrids appear, so it is clearly something that many users would appreciate. I think there are also some projects dedicated to hybrids.
*on the technical issues, I would personally really appreciate that flag, the useful discussion that it would generate if someone flagged my photos, and certainly using it on obs that need more info. But I also realize the huge range of photo equipment, experience, and skill for iNat users, and coupled with the ease of misunderstanding intentions on the internet, I think it’s probably better left alone.
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Heads up, after a lot of thought and discussion, we added a new Evidence of Presence annotation today, you can read more about it here (and please keep specific comments about it on that thread).
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Is there any way to search for this information (e.g. through a URL or other “hidden” method)? I recently wondered what my annotation tally was.
Adding the number of annotations a user has made (or alternatively, the number of observations annotated by the user) to their profile might encourage more folks to annotate. Even if there’s no leaderboards, it feels good to see the number go up, because it’s tangible evidence of your contributions to that part of the data set.
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The URL
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&term_id=17&user_id=chemistree gives you a total for your observations annotated with Alive or Dead. Replacing term_id=17 with term_id=22 will give you ones annotated with Evidence of Presence, term_id=1 shows you ones annotated with Life Stage, term_id=9 shows ones annotated with Sex, and term_id=12 gives ones with Plant Phenology. Using any of them in combination will show you observations with all the selected annotations. Using term_value_id in combination with term_id makes it possible to search for specific annotations - for example, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?term_id=1&term_value_id=7&user_id=chemistree shows all your observations annotated with Life Stage: Egg.
That may have been a bit more complicated than what you were looking for. The short answer is, I don’t know if you can search for observations annotated specifically by you, but there’s lots of other information to play around with.
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You lost a question mark in the first link. Wow, haven’t seen those urls yet!
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Thanks! I didn’t realize you could search annotations through the explore interface using URL magic. I’ll definitely be using that trick in the future.
This is I was curious about, because I’ve annotated a fair amount of other folks’ observations as I identified them. When a user adds an annotation to an observation, their icon (linked to their profile) shows up next to it. Because of that, I feel like there’s potential for the system to be able to list a user’s annotations, report a sum total, etc. as it currently can for identifications.
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Here’s a feature request for this, if you haven’t seen it already: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-annotations-tab-on-profile-page/24964
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@maractwin , what do you think of this mockup? Is “Adult” fully redundant, or are there some edge cases/species not covered by initial/terminal phase?
There are some labrids where the IP and TP look the same, so one can’t reliably put one of those labels on them. In that case adult is still useful. Though I would probably put it at the bottom of the list after IP and TP.
There is one more life stage that isn’t on this list: “larva”. It’s pretty uncommon for people to observe the larvae, which are mostly very small and pelagic. Though a few people are posting photos from black water dives where larval fish are sometimes seen. Larva belongs between egg and juvenile.
Hi, I was wondering whether it would be possible to add annotations for the reproductive phenology of gymnosperms?
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