Hello, I would like to contribute with my request regarding annotations:
Platform(s): website
Description of need:
Please re-order the list of “Evidence of Presence” options so the “Organism” option is always first on the list.
Feature request details:
As vast majority of animals’ observations are of the organism itself, it would be very convenient if the “Organism” option was always first on the list. Right now, it sometimes is even the fourth one (after Construction, Gall and Molt). I assume it’s in alphabetic order now. However, when annotating many observations hand by hand, this is quite tiresome and often leads to misclicks which then need to be corrected. Overall, it would save a lot of time it the option “Organism” was always first.
you may know this already, but in the identify module, under the annotation tab you can hit ‘e’ and then ‘o’ to make evidence of presence as organism, which i think is much faster if you’re mass annotating observations. you can also quickly navigate between the tabs in the identify module with shift+arrow keys
How would you feel about breaking down “Fruits or Seeds” into more detail via multiple categories?
Use case: I’m helping a research group build a native seed harvesting resources for their region, and we’re trying to figure out when they should be harvesting in their area. I thought I was hot snot, thinking of using iNat to figure out their harvest period via observation phenology, but came up short designating the difference between:
“This plant has finished flowering”,
“This plant is developing fruit/seed”
“The fruit/seed is mature”/“This plant is ready to harvest”.
I annotated the heck out of their region and got a rough phenology calendar set down, but it seems a loss to not have a means of making the harvest-ready distinction. Given this is a major concern for native plant conservation work and something that’s changing due to climate change, this would be really valuable to researchers (including us!).
How would you folks handle this? “Fruit/Seed Present” and “Mature Fruit/Seed” annotations? Any thoughts? I could just do a project/OF, but honestly that additional workflow would be rather annoying . One more annotation option would be pretty neat…
How would users reliably distinguish between “developing fruit/seed” and “mature fruit/seed”? While for some plants this is reasonably obvious (fleshy fruits changing color, seed pods opening), for many many plants the seeds develop inconspicuously and it may not be possible to see in photos whether the seeds are fully mature or not. Forcing users to choose what stage of fruiting a plant is at will likely make the annotation impossible to apply in practice, which seems to me a step back from the current system which is less nuanced but allows for a good indication of phenology stage in most cases.
I also think using language such as “ready to harvest” on a website that is mostly dedicated to wild organisms is a bad idea – many plants that people observe may not be edible or may even be poisonous, and in some places harvesting (some) wild plants may be illegal.
I could see a use for “This plant has finished flowering.” It would overlap with fruits/seeds, and “This plant is developing fruits/seeds,” of course. I mean, sometimes we’d need to click two or three of these for one flower. There are many times where I’d feel more comfortable clicking “finished flowering” than “fruits/seeds.” And then there are staminate plants, whose flowering may be over but fruits/seeds will never form.
Basically, though, the more complexity the more people will mark thing wrong. Especially when categories overlap.So I’m not thrilled with this idea, though “finished flowering” has appeal.
I have some sympathy with this, even if it coul dbe tricky to implement. It comes up for some wasps sich as Mutillidae where the males are only briefly present during the year, and most observations are of females. When there is an observation containing both, there is a motive to ‘decide’ that the osbervation is actually for the male, whether the observer intended that or not. The other option is to ask the observer to duplicate the observation, but not every observer is willing or obliged to do so.
The knowledge required per species to know the differences here are quite high. Guaranteed this would be misused and you’d end up with it being a rather useless tool.
Secondly, many plants have multiple flowers and flowering times. So to say a plant is finished flowering means you have to be certain there are no flowers left.
I feel the local overlap with each of these terms would be almost entirely useless. Like, I’ve stood in a patch of wild strawberries where some have started to form berries, and others are still flowering. Eventually, you’d have all three annotations occurring in the same immediate area.
And yeah, iNat isn’t designed as a tool to help people harvest. If you’re some one who likes to harvest wild edibles, I’ve always found it more important to learn your area, rather than hop on iNat and see if it’s, time to go harvest blueberries. Personally, I dislike the idea yuppies taking advantage of goodwilled people to get an easy harvest.
I’d like to throw in my vote to add “juvenile or female” under age and/or sex for birds. Even many ID guides only go down to that level of distinction, and unless you catch the bird at just the right angle and time of year, they are nearly indistinguishable for many species. I still think it would be useful to be able to distinguish those cases from adult male organisms without leaving both age and sex fields blank.
I think it’s worth stating again, I’m talking about conservation seed harvest, not your local blackberry bush. This is how plant conservation works in my region. Seedbank managers and local plant species researchers try to keep track of giant sites across broad regions that, realistically, we can not get everywhere in time to document phenology, let alone harvest seeds of conservative species. Thus, iNat is a majorly impactful resource for documenting phenology to alert when the team has to go drive 75 miles to go visit a particular site for a particular plant. So while I can see the argument that people could use it for wild food harvesting, no one is going to be out there looking to eat the Carex frankii I’m trying to tag.
Seemed worth clarifying, since I know wild food harvest is a very touchy subject that is treated as oppositional to conservation work. This is conservation work that seed managers really do need help with right now. Climate change is making a really hard task even harder, and utilizing resources like iNat is becoming more and more important for plant conservation timing.
It can, yeah. It just seemed worth inquiring if anyone could figure out a way to nicely integrate it into the existing phenological data coding system, instead of starting a new thing that is dependent on me personally managing it and manually entering each entry. Given this is a universal phenological, documentable trait in plants, it seems silly to create a new project for each region or project.
Obviously, “no” is a valid answer, but seemed worth discussing!
But the majority of iNat users are laypeople who are most likely not familiar with your specific use case or the meaning you are assigning to “harvest”. For the average user, using annotations with this wording would be dangerously misleading, because it would likely be interpreted as suggesting edibility. The option to label an observation as “ready to harvest” would also obscure questions about the legality of doing so. “Ripe” merely suggests the maturity of the seed; “harvest” is an invitation to action, which depends on external factors (social, legal, etc.) that are not dependent on the phenology of the plant.
Even from a research and conservation perspective, I would venture that most researchers using iNat data to study phenology are probably not planning to visit the site to collect seeds. And for those wishing to collect seeds, photos may not be enough to determine whether the seeds are at the correct stage for harvesting, particularly for plants where seed development is somewhat hidden or germination is tricky and requires that seeds be collected within a short window of time. And this seems likely to vary from year to year, so past years may not provide a good idea about when to visit a particular site.
I agree that observation fields seem like they would suit your specific needs better.
In terms of the work involved, using observation fields isn’t hugely different to using annotations, particularly now that @megachile’s iNaturalist Metadata tool has streamlined input. You wouldn’t generally want to rely on assessments from untrained individuals for seed harvesting, and for many plants, a “ready to harvest” status would change over time as seeds degrade, so it isn’t useful to iNat as a whole.
. One more annotation option would be pretty neat…