When there’s an observation of a man-made object, should you put ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for ‘Evidence of Presence’ in the ‘Data Quality Assessment’?
An example of the type of observation I’m referring to: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/56918390
I often see people split between the 2 options and since it’s not really important I just don’t do anything.
What are you talking about, that’s not a man-made object, it’s a stegosaur!
But yes, feel free to mark these as no evidence of organism
I guess it doesn’t really matter much, but in my eye I see that as definitely evidence of an organism - it’s something made by an organism (in this case a human), just like a nest or a burrow is. No evidence of organism to me would be something like a rock, that can exist independently of any life
It is evidence of organism and it is wild. Just ID as human and move on, no need to mess with the DQA.
I’d like to see an option to label something as “Joke.” Labelling man-made objects as “Human” opens the door wide to uploaded photos of literally anything, even unmanipulated rocks, book pages, or stars because a human photographed them. The photo file therefore has a human connection even if it is blank. Carry the nonsense a step further and an image generated by AI is also human because humans designed the AI.
I’m with @raymie . Just mark it as “Human” and move on. Don’t spend any more time on an unimportant observation that will be Casual anyway.
I am not really a big fan of ‘joke’ observations and less a fan of Human observations, but I think the observer was just showing off a unique find on the beach (I would have ID’d the kelp rather than the toy), but I wouldn’t waste much time on something like this, especially since it has been ID’d by numerous ppl and data quality doesn’t really matter since it is casual grade anyway
that is going a bit over-board don’t you think? It is like taking a picture of an animal path and duplicating it for every species found in the area that would likely use it… ultimately any human observation is immediately rated casual grade, so it has little effect on the rest of us… but I do agree that this should not be on iNat since the observation is about a non-living organism, made by humans, yes, but that is not really what iNat is about
If Ided as “Human”, an AI image would also need to be downvoted in the DQA since unlike a photo of a rock, it doesn’t even have correct info about location, date, etc since it wasn’t an observation of anything in the natural world.
“Human” observations can at least provide some useful info about the spatial/temporal distributions of iNat observers which can be useful in determining potential patterns/biases in iNat data.
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