When I used to collect herps for museum specimens by road cruising, we’d annotate the specimens in our field catalog as AOR (alive on road), DOR (dead on road), and even IOR (injured on road).
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Can it go both ways? Someone keeps messaging me to ask that I fill in the “Insect life stage” observation field on my observations instead of or in addition to the “Life Stage” annotation, because the former causes the latter to be filled in automatically, but not the other way around, and because apparently it’s easier for them to search for an observation field value than to search for an annotation value. So it would be very convenient to have the same observation fields filled in automatically when an annotation is made, as well as the reverse.
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I just meant a one-time import of the data. I assume that field I mentioned would be pretty much deprecated now that there’s an annotation.
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Until annotations are exportable, I’m not sure we should consider any observation fields as deprecated.
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As in a downloadable CSV? You can use a collection project to export to CSV or alternatively the API.
More on improvements to exporting data here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/data-users-what-are-your-use-cases-and-requests-for-exporting-data/2972
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I would be surprised if 5 percent of users are comfortable trying to download data via the API.
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Will new annotations have an own graphic on species page?
By the way, do we have an opportunity to do the search using annotation criterion?
You can search using the annotations from the identify page. I don’t think you can from explore (at least not without pasting the correct parameters into the URL)
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There aren’t any plans for adding a graph for Alive or Dead on taxon pages at the moment.
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Tony and team - great work on the new annotation, this is simple and useful.
I’d be surprised if it was as high as 5%.
We really need to have annotations available in the CSV download
This is a interesting thread, but I don’t know if the iNat staff have decided to act on any of the suggestions. Asking for input is great, but leaving responders in the dark re future plans is, in my case, demotivating.
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I would add an option for specimens to the list that @JeremyHussell suggested near the top.
A sterile option for plants to indicate no flowers, buds, or fruits.
@bouteloua I’m going to push back a little on the dead/not dead option for perennials. If an herbaceous perennial is overwintering, then the aboveground growth is dead regardless of whether the organism that produced the tissue is still alive. From an identification perspective, it makes a lot of sense to lump in dead tissue with dead plants. Perhaps reworded the option to dead (visible material only; potentially just dormant)? Perhaps a dead (entire organism) option could be added too if that is important to some people. I think that having the option to label an organism dead or alive would be a great addition for plants too.
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Seems too far from cut and dry for the possibility as a standard annotation. At what point is aboveground herbaceous vegetation dead, as determined secondhand via what is typically a partial photo of the plant?
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When adding annotations to a batch of observations or makes sense to have a set of annotations which can be applied to every observation otherwise there is no easy of filtering out the ones which don’t need annotation from those which have not been annotated yet.
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Does this mean at the time of the observation or at the time the thing you observer was created by the animal or detached from the animal?
For instance tracks, scat, feeding signs all show that the animal was alive when they were created whereas a feather could have been shed from a living bird or be as a result of a bird being killed. I don’t know that much about snakes so not sure if a shed snake skin would clearly be from a living snake.
How about an hornet with a damaged wing? I’m fairly sure it couldn’t fly (it attempted to take off when I moved it off a path) so I’m fairly sure it couldn’t survive, but I’ve no idea how long it would survive for as the injury itself wasn’t fatal.
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This is pretty neat! Is there a way to batch-edit all my animal observations (except for a couple which were not alive) to be marked as alive? I can try to remember to do it for future ones as I add them, but I’m not going to change all of them by hand now :) I saw you can set annotations from batch-edit, but there’s multiple alive/dead ones and I don’t know what to enter on the text field either! (just “Alive”?)
and for ferns? (sporangia closed/open/absent?) and life -stage for ferns?
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There is cause of death:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/2347
Roadkill:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/160
Plus some fields for bone which indicate the animal must be dead.
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Not only ferns, but all Pteridophyte and Bryophyte!
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I had not read this comment until now, but I have made a little time ago a Feature Request just like this https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/specific-sex-annotations-for-each-taxon/7744
Does changing it to a single annotation called dormant/dead help? I think that might be more appropriate to lump them like this anyway. In my mind, it’s usually rather simple to see when the aboveground vegetation is dead and can be seen every year after the first hard freeze. The plants turn a different color and are completely wilted when they have been hit with a freeze and the tissue dies. Rosette forming perennials are the hardest as they still maintain some aboveground material.
To get into the weeds (perhaps unnecessarily), I probably call something fully dead/dormant when 90-100% of the aboveground tissue is dead. If it’s less than 50% (maybe even up to 60-70% in annuals), I think most people would just consider that frost damage and not a killing freeze. Perhaps the most important thing is whether the flowers and fruits are dead and if the plant is producing new tissue. If not and it’s getting colder, then it would make sense to call it dead or dormant in my mind. If it is, then it’s not there yet. This may be a difficult problem in theory, but in practice, I think anyone who has watched a garden or been out in nature much has a good intuitive sense of when things are dead or dormant. There may be some grey areas, but I think it’s generally simpler than the above suggests. When a freeze roles in, it seems to usually come in the form of a soft freeze where an individual plant sustains minor damage, or a hard freeze where a plant sustains a lot of damage without a whole lot of in-between.
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