I moved the above post to this thread to keep discussion about proposed annotations changes together.
On a separate issue to flowers/fruits, the annotations for leaves appear skewed to a particular subset of deciduous plants:
Breaking Leaf Buds
Colored Leaves
Green Leaves
No Live Leaves
Until recently, I hadnāt applied āBreaking Leaf Budsā because it didnāt seem to match the growth pattern of Australian evergreen plants. Iām happy to use it now, but I canāt be the only one confused by it. The descriptions āColored Leavesā and āGreen Leavesā are also unhelpful for plants that donāt normally have mature green leaves, or where the new growth may be coloured, depending on temperature:
https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations/288924899
A better set of descriptions might be:
New Leaf Growth
Mature Leaves
Senescing Leaves
No Live Leaves
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There is an annotation complication there if someone can recognise there is fruit present but not whether or not it is ripe. Annotation layers might be too fiddly, but would be interesting (applying a general fruit annotation bringing up its own little sub-annotation list, say!).
There are definitely major differences phenology- and appearance-wise between unripe fruit, ripe fruit, fruits that have opened, the actual seeds, and stuff like the lingering woody fruits you get on Melaleuca for certain.
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80% of iNatters donāt know what āscenescingā means, and an additional 10% donāt realize that colorful fall leaves are scenescing. Other than that, the leaf annotation idea is pretty good.
On the fruit front, more than once Iāve wished we could distinguish between ripe fruit and ovaries that are just past pollination, but I have my doubts about people being able to apply the distinction correctly. Weāre probably doing well is the presence of fruits is accurately reported.
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I donāt see it as a complication. If people canāt tell whether fruit is ripe, but can tell that fruit is present, the few who annotate will probably select āfruitā but not āripe fruitā, which is the intended outcome. That still leaves open the option for someone who can recognise ripe fruit to add the āripe fruitā annotation later or downvote an incorrect annotation.
Iād be open to other wording for senescence, such as āleaves changing colourā. However, most people donāt annotate leaves anyway, and the current wording has a few people marking āgreen leavesā for evergreen plants. What the change opens up is the chance for informed annotaters to use a core iNat function to greater effect.
Further on flowers and fruit, I think the final option would be better as:
No flowers or fruit visible
This better captures the issue of evidence for vs. against, similar to wording on ID disagreements. Recently, Iāve been mapping distributions of Box Mistletoe near my home to understand its urban ecology. Iām making no attempt to zoom in on the mistletoes, which are up high in eucalypts, to show the unripe fruit expected at this time of year. But I canāt in good faith annotate āNo flowers or fruitā, so these observations remain pending annotation.
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Maybe āLife Stageā should be renamed āObservation Life Stageā and continue being a single value field like it is now.
Then, a second āOther Life Stagesā field should be added and which accepts multiple values.
āOther Life Stagesā would be similar to āEvidence of Presenceā. I can see āOther Life Stagesā being useful for beetles where sometimes there is an adult beetle laying eggs, or when there are larvae emerging from eggs, or when an adult beetle is emerging from its pupa, or when there are clearly pupae and the picture shows a larvae next to them.
Observations (and therefore their annotations) are for individual organisms, and staff have noted many times that observations are the fundamental unit of iNaturalist. It seems very unlikely that annotations that break that definition of the observation would be included.
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Just adding ripe fruit in addition to fruit? I would have thought it would expand into ripe and unripe fruit, though that would have backwards compatibility issues, true. Feels odd to have typed fruit annotation next to untyped fruit, which is why I like the drop down menu option becoming available when fruit is selected.
My thought is that you add āripe fruitā as an additional stage and leave āfruitā as a stage without further definition. As you note, it avoids backward compatibility issues. It also means people can mark āfruitā without needing to know whether the fruit is ripe or not. Plenty of times, people will mark āflowersā without additionally noting the equally visible āflower budsā. Incomplete annotation is less of a problem than incorrect annotation.
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I was going to make a feature request for the addition of some plant annotations, but apparently iNat staff is ānot currently accepting feature requests relating to annotationsā, so here I am.
We really need an āExpanding leavesā annotation for species with naked buds whose leaf primordia are not enclosed by bud scales but nevertheless expand into mature leaves. Examples are Carya cordiformis, Juglans cinerea and Filicium decipiens (which gave me the idea for this annotation as I have just finished reviewing its observations). This annotation could also apply to the leaves of species with enclosed buds that are still actively growing, up to the point where they stop growing completely.
Additionally, I think the āCannot be determinedā annotation should be extended to the Flowers and fruits and Leaves categories, for observations where only isolated floral buds/flowers/fruits or only isolated leaves are included. Observations of a single leaf on a countertop or in someoneās hand are too common for this not to exist.
Finally please give our conifer homies some love with āMale/staminate conesā, āFemale/ovulate conesā and āSeedsā annotations
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I agree with you on all fronts. The current annotations are heavily skewed toward temperate deciduous plants with enclosed buds. Many tropical evergreen plants have naked buds and never lose all their leaves at once, although most do lose some of their leaves every year. I had also thought that āSenescing/senescent leavesā would make for a much more accurate annotation than āColored leavesā. My full list:
- Breaking leaf buds
- Expanding leaves
- Mature leaves
- Senescing leaves
- No live leaves
As Iāve suggested, the less wordy āCannot be determinedā that is already in use for the Sex category would stand in well for āNot enough evidence to be assessedā. Otherwise āInsufficient evidenceā might work. Why was your feature request rejected exactly?
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To keep the conversation together on one active thread ? (Rejected as a NEW feature request - not the request as such was rejected)
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I see. Thank you
The issue is that this thread isnāt so good for reaching iNat staff and petitioning in favour of annotation changes, unlike specific feature requests
? This is the dedicated thread. And the author is tiwane. iNat staff.
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That sounds like a very technical difference from the existing ābreaking leaf buds,ā and I doubt if it matters much. Separating the two is basically annotating taxon rather than phenology, which isnāt what annotations are for.
That would be annotated āgreen leaves,ā with no need to annotate anything regarding flowers. Why? Because that kind of observation is not useful to someone studying flower phenology, which is the kind of user who needs the flower annotations.
Now there, Iām with you. Many of us have asked for that.
Youāre right. When I opened the thread I jumped to a late reply but Tiwane indeed created it. There is also a list of annotations under review at the top which I hadnāt noticed
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I agree that the difference is very granular and ātechnicalā. Ultimately what I struggle with is the goal of annotations and why there are limits to how specific they can be. For the sake of efficiency, simplicity and user-friendliness, I am of the opinion that there should exist as few annotations as possible, but sometimes the existing ones just donāt strike my preferred level of granularity. Also āgreen leavesā is actually too granular for plants whose mature leaves are not green, like the āCrimson Kingā cultivar of Acer platanoides.
I agree there is no need to add an annotation in the Flowers and fruits category in this scenario. I am just worried that someone will add an erroneous, incorrigible annotation later if I donāt indicate the absence of floral buds, flowers or fruits. I guess āNo flowers or fruitsā is good enough, although it canāt be proven that the plant the leaf was collected from did not bear any of these structures at the time of collection.
Agreed. As others mentioned above, incorrect annotations are much more common and problematic than incomplete ones.
A related problem Iāve noticed is fruit thatās hanging onto the plant but is no longer viable (e.g. gray, shriveled acorns that are already dead, but didnāt absciss properly). Iād prefer they werenāt marked as fruit, and where flowers and buds are absent, the āNot enough evidence to assess flower/fruitā would be useful to prevent future erroneous annotations as āfruitingā.
Yeah thatās not what anyoneās arguing, but we are actively slowing the research process by not curating annotations to reduce the amount of data checking that researchers need to do.
A great example of this was the Yucca Phenology Project and research article (in which they manually annotated ~9,000 observations), relying in part upon correct annotations to allow for accurate characterization of changes in phenology related to climate change, and also allude to the untapped power and limitations of iNaturalist/citizen science data generally via recommendations for improved best practices (including annotating lack of evidence for flowering/fruiting assessment as I mentioned in my first post on this):
āMost importantly, we want to use this journal post to thank all the people who have taken the time to photograph and identify Yuccasā¦As we show in our paper, we can actually get a fairly good idea of just where, when and to-whom those flowering anomalies happened, and we can also ask some neat follow-up questions, too. For example, did species in areas that had unusual flowering events have reduced or no flowering during normal flowering times? And while I am excited about the work weāve done, I think there is enormous and yet-untapped potential to look at phenology trends at scale using iNaturalist data.ā
and
āDespite these promising attributes, best practices for use of iNaturalist and associated citizen science data resources must still be developed to realize the full value of these data streams for assessing plant phenology trendsā¦In particular, we scored flowers, open flowers and whole plants as present or absent. We added āuncertainā as a scoring category, because initial examination revealed cases where image quality was poor or the state otherwise difficult to observe.ā
one more:
āiNaturalist records often can be used to report absence, which is particularly useful for modeling climatic drivers of phenology. Definitive absence requires scoring if a whole plant is visible in the photograph, which we strongly recommend capturing.ā
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