I’m 5’2” and live in a forest. I cannot SEE the tree top let alone get a decent photo.
I mark the observation by what is visible in the photographs I take NOT what may or may not be on other parts of the plant. I assume that when the identifiers filter for flowers or fruit or seeds they expect to SEE those in the observation, not to be “guessed at” because of phenology.
I don’t need an extra thing to mark saying there ‘isn’t enough evidence for your particular needs” when I have marked what evidence is available. This might be why your request didn’t fly the first time?
I also expect the researchers will do their own research. Not guess.
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I would think that people studying phenology emphasize the data about what is there – flower, fruits, etc., and not what isn’t there. I think they can cope with observations annotated as “no flowers or fruits” at flowering or fruiting time. I don’t think we need to worry about misleading researchers by annotating observations based on what we see in the photos.
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I rarely use the “no evidence of flowering” annotation because I don’t find it very useful. I have over time identified one use case though: biennials with a winter rosette. I mark those rosettes and it gives me a nice curve with a peak in winter to early spring preceding their budding/blooming period. However, this only works on certain plants. For many others, it just doesn’t seem to provide any useful info.
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If someone is only looking to focus on or study the foliage then it helps narrow down results quite a bit. There are times when I want to be able to identify plants before they flower and to get better at that I use that filter when browsing observations. Thats how I use it myself anyway..
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I find the now existing foliage filters more useful for that. Not all plants that have “no evidence of flowering” have leaves on them (e.g. deciduous trees in winter), and just because something started blooming doesn’t exclude the presence of foliage. Most plants will keep their leaves while producing buds, flowers, and fruits. The foliage annotations can be stacked on top of the flowering annotations, e.g. you can have plants annotated as both flowering and having green leaves.
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That was the original intention - to help us ID evergreen plants with no flowers or fruit.
Yes, although I think overlap is unavoidable, eg. A leafmine can be considered a track, a discarded pupae casing could be both a construction and a moult, if “Mark” or “Sign”, are too ambigious or there are translation issues. Dare I suggest “Other” as an evidence of prescence category? @DianaStuder @kanescompendium
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Evidence of presence - other - would cover porcupine quills - which don’t fit anywhere now. And owl pellets - which are not scat.
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Only if there is a cocoon. Otherwise, just the pupal exoskeleton is strictly a molt.
“Hair” is the correct annotation for porcupine quills.
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Thank you - another batch to annotate one day
A leafmine should not be annotated as a “track” because iNat defines “track” as an:
Impression in ground or snow made by an organism
Each annotation has a specific definition that can be found here.
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There are seedlings at fruiting time, which is interesting; some adult plants that year at that time didn’t set fruit, was there a drought or a burn? Or do they simply not flower every year? Something to investigate!
There is a definite difference between ‘no flowers and fruits’ and ‘data unavailable’, I’m partial to Melaleuca and I assure you that even if you can’t find it the adult plants definitely have fruit on there somewhere, but I wouldn’t call it messing up the phenology charts necessarily to have outliers. The majority of the data will cohere with the expected trend (unless it doesn’t) and that will give the proper picture.
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I don’t know about Melaleuca, but many other species I’ve seen where there’s only a leaf photo for instance are marked as “no flowers or fruits” when there’s no way to assess if there are flowers or fruits.
I understand there will be outliers, but there are cases of clear data quality issues which could be avoided by simply adding the option to determine that a plant wasn’t sufficiently surveyed/documented to assess this at least somewhat reliably.
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Has it already been suggested to allow multiple life stage annotations for a single observation? Sometimes you get photos of parents with eggs or parents with babies, and it’d be helpful for the life stage charts on the taxon pages to be able to apply both relevant life stage annotations, particularly since users aren’t generally going to duplicate that observation for annotation purposes.
Obviously something like this could open up more opportunities for inexperienced users to butcher the life stage annotation categories, but I’d say it’s worth considering.
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An observation is supposed to be for a single individual organism. The correct course of action for a situation like this is to duplicate the observation.
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Just be sure to include some notes explaining the purpose of the duplication, e.g. “this observation is for the adult” - “this observation is for the juvenile” etc. Not all identifiers pay attention to annotations and someone might DQA one of them into casual unless that is made clear in some other way.
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I agree that notes would be helpful, but users shouldn’t be using the DQA to make observations casual grade solely because they are duplicates. If you see this, please flag for curators.
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That’s what I made my Multiple Life Stages project for. I still think what you’re suggesting is a good idea and what I personally think should be done as well. I know duplicating is an option (and maybe technically what is supposed to be done). But I much prefer to have them in the same observation and use the observation fields for my project.
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Also, like… a lot of users just aren’t going to do the duplication thing, especially for the same species. Sure, you could try asking for a second observation to annotate that baby along with the mom, but the hit rate on those requests will be abysmal.
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I’ve recently been annotating mistletoe observations for Australia, trying to understand issues around their evolution and ecosystem functions. The existing plant phenology categories don’t fully capture what I am after. For example, in some cases, unripe fruit are held on a mistletoe for the better part of a year and only ripen when the following year’s flower buds form. The reasons are unclear but perhaps relate to the phenology of new leaf growth. If an observer annotates “fruit”, this fails to capture the timing of ripening. I’ve been using observation fields to mark ripe fruit but then need to run repeat searches by month and manually collate the data. That’s fine, but I wonder if other users would benefit from another category. Equally, if I could mark ripe fruit directly under annotations, the data would be directly available to others. I haven’t submitted this as a feature request because I would first like to understand whether others would use this.
Separately, I am wondering how others approach climate zone differences when looking at phenology. I can search by (Australian) state to look at flowering times, but this isn’t a good match for climate given the different north-south extent of different states.
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