Let's Talk Annotations

I also have noticed that with the recent update the order of annotations for flowering plants has changed. It used to be phenology first, but now it’s sex first. I’m not sure why - it’s still life stage before sex for insects and it doesn’t even make sense in terms of alphabetical order since P comes before S. I wished it would be relegated to second place again since it applies much less frequently than phenology.

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Oh, thank you! I was wondering if I’d imagined that the order used to be the other way.

Suggestion: Termites and Ants: It would be handy to be able to filter all the adult obs to see just the alate (winged) stage. If the larva is the grub, then all workers, drones and queens are adults. So to achieve this, can we have an ‘alate’ stage added to Formicidae and Termitoidae?

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… not really a suggestion for a new manual annotation: However, for Lepidoptera (and perhaps other taxa), could the automatic ID algorithm be used to automatically fill in “caterpillar” or “adult”? I guess it is easy to recognise, and most observers don’t bother to use the annotation.

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there’s this topic: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/use-computer-vision-to-annotate-observations/3331

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I know it’s something usually done through flags, but i think it better fits forum. English annotation for plant phenology “budding” wasn’t clear not only for most users, but for those who translated it too, in Russian it’s called “почкование” that’s clearly is not about flower bud specifically, this choice of word always got me confused (I didn’t know what original version was). Now I know it’s about flowering and should be called something like “Бутон(ы)” as I can’t word it as a process in Russian. Probably there’re mistakes with other languages too.

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Yeah, a long-known issue:

Any update @tiwane on if this will be clarified to mean flower budding?

To suggest a different translation for “budding” in Russian, if you create a Crowdin account you can find the terms to translate here: https://crowdin.com/translate/inaturalistweb/38/en-ru#q=budding

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Thank you! I asked the curator of Russian plant community here on iNat and added the translation “Бутонизация”. It will work for flowering budding, if there will be a split, for leaf budding “Набухание почек” should be used.

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Yes, I just need to make an issue for this change. Will do so now.

EDIT: apparently I already made an issue… https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/2326

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Just found out Pteridophyte and Bryophyte have a gender choice, but no mention of reproductive cycle, what’s the cause of that?

The gametophytes, which are the life stage most often seen and photographed, are either male or female.

It’s not a question about why is gender here, but why it’s the only thing there.

Sorry. I misinterpreted your comment.

Mainly because we wanted to start off a small number of annotations which were applicable to large numbers of commonly observed taxa, so we went with a few broad ones and got caught up in working on other things (mainly dealing with the continual growth of iNat).

This has been discussed elsewhere on the forum. TL; DR: if it’s going to happen, it’s not going to happen anytime soon, although it’s a cool idea, and the more annotated observations we have to train a hypothetical model on, the better, so it would be great if people can continue annotating observations. You can use the Identify page to do that pretty quickly, I made a tutorial here.

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Has anyone suggested the position of the organism photographed - ventral, lateral, dorsal etc.

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That’s too much for annotations (at least for now), observation fields are better.

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I think perhaps photo annotations - https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/photo-annotations/937 - would be a better place for these kinds of labels? We don’t have this feature yet, but it is on the cards apparently.

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Now that I am (belatedly) getting into the annotation thing, I find myself frustrated because it seems I can mark an observation as male OR female, adult OR juvenile, but it’s not unusual for an observation to include two or more individuals, male and female, adult and juvenile. I’m just leaving those unannotated for now, but I’d much rather be able to choose both states.

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It won’t happen as curators say 1 obs = 1 individual. Though there’re fields for sexes, at least I saw some for male presence and their number.

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