Linking a thread below because the misuse of the term “juvenile” for birds is still causing understandable confusion. The “juvenile” option really should be replaced with the term “immature” for birds, because all juvenile birds are immature, but not all immature birds are juveniles.
See this thread: How should immature organisms be annotated?
Cones for conifers please and thank you. Status update??
I see regularly photo’s of photo’s, for example:
Do we want to add an annotations/tags for this and if yes what is the most appropiate one for this?
what is an example of a practical application for this?
Filtering. Maybe someone wants to get rid of these photo’s in their set or find them quickly to check for copyright infrigments or in certain cases give instructions to users.
I’m going to a lot of photo’s and are willing to add an annotation for this. But if nobody is interested in this I can leave it as is.
I don’t see it as worth annotating. I know people who do this because their camera takes good photos but their phone has the GPS location. It doesn’t effect the validity of their observation.
I merged the above comments on annotating photos of photos to the open Annotations thread.
It’s worth noting that annotations apply to observations, not to individual photos, though there are requests to support photo-level annotations.
I’m not sure an annotation what you really want?
“Annotations” on iNat refer to the life stage and other features of the organism in the observation – not to the type of media or the assessment of the accuracy of the evidence provided (these items fall under the data quality assessment).
Photos of screens are potentially a DQA issue, because they sometimes represent the time and place the photo of the photo was taken, not when the organism was seen. (Some people take photos of the camera screen in the field to capture the GPS location, but I see a fair amount of cases where someone has taken a photo of their computer screen because they have only used the app and don’t know how to share their old photos with iNat otherwise.)
I have rarely found that photos of screens are copyright infringements (most of the time when people use someone else’s photo, they do so by copying the file, or at least taking a cropped screen shot so it is not obvious the photo is not their own)
At first, I thought people posting screenshots of other photos were cheating in some way, posting photos from websites or something. Now I know some people do this with their own photos for some reason. Maybe they can’t upload from the first camera? So I ignore this. (Unless there really is a likely copyright violation.) If the first photo was their own, there’s nothing wrong with this.
I used a lot of time to skim through the relevant-looking comments on this thread, but I apologize if I still missed if this had been proposed before.
It has been suggested that fungi should have more options for Annotations. It has been argumented that everything is irrelevant for fungi as “for by far the majority of non-pathogenic taxa, both “Evidence of presence” and reproductive stage will be the fruiting body” – Then Why does “Organism” exist for plants and animals, as the evidence is just the organism itself in a photo/photos for the majority of them?
Sorry if I sound aggressive, that is not my intention. I’m just asking. At the moment, there seems to be only Gall, and I would like to suggest that Organism or Fruiting body should be added for Fungi if there is anything else to choose from for Evidence of Presence.
The other suggestion that I have, is that
Slime moulds should/could have annotations similar to nymph or adult: Plasmodium or Fruiting body (Sporofori).
Similar to many insect nymphs, slime moulds in Plasmodium stage are hard to impossible to identify from even macro camera photos. Perhaps microscope photos are better to be tagged with Observation fields, but these stages could be in Annotations.
Well, identifying slime moulds in the iNaturalist format has more issues than just that one, so I understand if you won’t add this… I’m nowhere near an expert so I would have wanted to reply to another thread instead to discuss it, as this thread (789 replies) is already long enough, but that thread was closed already 2 years ago: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-identify-slime-molds/38148/8
If you feel that reopening an old thread would be useful, you can message the forum moderators and request them to reopen it.
One observation field feature that would be beneficial is to have stats for the fields such as if a observation field was taking track of the taxas of different plants being pollinated by pollinators and the stats would list all the taxas by how many observations that have the taxa listed in the observation field. This will help researchers identity what specific pollinators favor what plants and vise versa. Alternately, is there a possible GitHub repository or extension/website for observation field stats? I am not a code developer at all but looking for an easy way to view the stats for a specific project.
This thread is for suggestions about annotations which are different to observation fields. It is possible to download data on the usage of observation fields currently, though I don’t think that there is any nicely formatted display of observation field responses like there are for many annotations on taxon pages, etc.
“We” (the iNat community) just had a phenology webinar led by Carrie. Tony is probably uploading it to YouTube right now. The webinar could have been called “Let’s Talk Annotations”, since there WAS a lot of talking about annotations.
Post updated with link to webinar: https://youtu.be/57teTK5V5t0?si=M18n7DuOuCO47Zbg
I’d like to see if there might be interest in phenology attributions for grasses and sedges being updated. I’m too much of a novice to suggest a set of attributes, but here is the use case for my suggestion:
Hopefully this is the correct place to post - I came here from the “Read first” post on the Features forum page.
I work with grasses and sedges as lot. The spikelets contain flowers, so I treat them as the flowers themselves, for purposes of annotation. Immature spikelets = flower buds. Spikelets with anthers or stigmas sticking out = flowering. Dried dead spikelets = fruit. Frustrating thing is that some spikelets are hard to classify – Is a well-developed spikelet in late bud, or more-or-less flowering but without the parts sticking out, or definitely past flowering (in seed/fruit)? I don’t know.
I know this has been addressed multiple times, but I want to lend my support to add a category for monoecious vs. dioecious annotations at least for groups like gymnosperms where that condition can be variable and useful in identification.
In normally dioecious Ephedra species, I am rarely seeing monoecious individuals and would like to annotate them for easy reference later.
The sex category just gives me “male,” “female,” and “cannot be determined.” I use “cannot be determined” for vegetative individuals and it doesnt feel appropriate for monoecious individuals.
It doesn’t need to necessarily be included in sex at all. Perhaps we could just add a category for “breeding systems” with values of “androdioecious, dioecious, gynodioecious, and monoecious.” I think this could be useful for any group of plant where the breeding system is variable.
Posted by another user on the establishment annotation blog post, but it does appear that most uses of the “Not Establsihed” annotation are currently incorrect: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?term_id=33&term_value_id=34