Indeed, it often needs an explanatory comment because receiving an ID of “human” on some inanimate object can be very confusing especially for new users (“there’s no person in this picture, why do you say it’s human?”). There are no annotation options for humans to indicate indirect evidence vs. an actual human in the picture. For a while, I marked things like trash, toys, artificial plants etc. as both “human” and “no evidence of organism.” It’s not a very satisfying work-around though and I’m unsure if it’s even appropriate.
A rock is different from pencils or a slab of concrete though. A rock is part of nature but not an organism. The pencil and concrete are made by humans and thus indirect evidence of human activity. It seems a good number of identifiers will mark them human. I agree it would be nice to have some guidance or possibly an annotation option for human artifacts. I’ve seen landscape pictures getting marked “human” because there’s a road running through them. That was a bit of a head-scratcher from the “slipper slope” side of this. I could have easily found plants to ID instead in the image.
Examples in particular that I struggle with are observations e.g. of museum models or botanical drawings/paintings that are clearly meant to be accurate depictions of nature but made by humans. The observer must be fully aware that these are models/artwork, but they are still curious what organism is depicted. I remember coming across an observation of a beautiful mural of local wildflowers, clearly identifiable to species. I imagine it can be very frustrating and off-putting to have a “Homo sapiens” slapped on them. These might be cases where “no evidence of organism” in combination with an ID for the species depicted may be better?
Just please don’t mark them captive/cultivated. Stuffed toys or rubber snakes are not captive animals, and plastic flowers are not cultivated plants.
The responses I’m getting here are quite varied, which I’m not surprised about. I’ve added a poll to my original post if anyone would like to vote there instead of arguing in the comments. I’m holding out for a response from staff before I decide how I’ll handle this sort of thing in the future.
When I come across something like a fake flower, I leave a comment saying something like “this is an artificial flower. On iNaturalist all man-made objects are considered evidence of humans.” Then I ID it as Human.
If I can’t see any organism, real or fake, in the photo, I sometimes leave a comment like “I’m not seeing any organism here, what are you trying to identify?” But only if the observer is still active. Otherwise I might leave it for someone with better eyesight to pore over, or just mark the DQA as No Evidence of Organism, depending on how likely it seems that there really is something there.
Just yesterday I came across an “unknown” photo of a bunch of bottles of liquor. I felt like I was playing “Where’s Waldo?” (Waldo being the purported organism) Maybe there’s a fly somewhere? Maybe there’s tequila with a worm in it (which I guess would make the location and/or time inaccurate, because who knows where the heck it came from?) Maybe some college kid was drinking when they were supposed to be making observations for a class? Maybe it’s just a joke?
Since I couldn’t decide on the best approach, I decided to “kick the can down the road” (metaphorically speaking) and do nothing.
My apologies for leaving it in the great pile of unkowns, for someone else to deal with!
The burden is on the observer to provide a photo that shows something that is an organism and that a reviewer can reasonably see and ID. If the photo is so bad that you can’t quickly pick out something to try to ID, then too bad. It should be marked “Evidence of organism = No.” If it’s some human artifact, mark it as Human. The result is the same.
In the case of botanical drawings, models, and even some silk flowers, I will ID as Homo sapiens, comment on why, and say “probably meant to illustrate/imitate Species X” if I know what that species is and it looks like the observer wanted to know.
It would be nice to hear from staff on this. I mostly work through observations in the Unknown category, so unless the observer leaves a note you don’t even know the intended focus of the observation. When there’s an obvious human artifact in the center of the photo, I’ll ID as “Human” with a note saying why, and to please message me if I missed something. But I’m a rule-follower, and if I should be doing it differently, I’d love to know.
There is an observation field “Fake organism taxon” that can also be used (though I would probably comment as well since observation fields are easy to overlook).
As I noted above, I am a bit torn about how to handle such observations, however. If you have, say, a mural with a recognizable depiction of a real organism it doesn’t feel entirely right to me to ID as human. It fails to acknowledge the artist’s skill and intention. iNat does accept drawings in certain contexts (i.e., field drawings made by the observer), so there might be an argument for IDing the organism depicted and marking as “no evidence of organism” (because not based on a real encounter of the observer with the organism). But my impression is that the consensus tends towards IDing such cases as human.