Hello, wondering about best practices for posting. If I see one species multiple times, in different locations along a hike, is it better to lump these together in an upload? Or post them separately? For instance, while on a 3 mile hike today I took pictures of several separate instances of Pacific Hound’s Tongue along the way. Should these be posted together as a single observation, or separate since they were in different locations?
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Different location => different observation.
If you’d rather lump them into one observation make sure the location boundary circle encompasses the locations of each photo.
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For the other posts like this, the staff always say to make each individual a separate observation.
I usually just post one of the photos and leave the others unposted.
In the end, it’s up to you what you want to do.
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As long it’s not the same individual at the same place and time I think anything’s fair game. On a three-mile hike you could make hundreds of observations of that species if you wanted to and it’d be fine.
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that’s a great tip - thanks so much!
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thank you so much!
perfect, thanks so much!
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But if you do so, make quite sure that they really are the same species. I frequently see observations where the observer unknowingly uploaded different species thinking that they were different individuals of a species.
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Observations should be for individual organisms. I wouldn’t recommend doing this. For the example the OP gave, best to make a few individual observations, one for each plant.
I guess technically it’s OK, but iNat isn’t desigend to record abundance and adding hundreds of observations puts a large burden on the identification community. IMO best to maybe make a few observations at different points along the trail, that can be helpful to show distribution and also potentially record plants in a different phenological state.
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In order to record an ecosystem, it take a lot of points to paint a picture.
Most science benefits from more data points.
In order to describe a rare plant area, it’s important to have as many observations as possible to map them.
In the future, people looking at iNaturalist to see what he landscape once looked like will get a different version of reality if they see three Hemlock trees in an area, compared to 500 Hemlocks in various stages of growth.
I wish that people had taken photos of American Chestnuts in the forest before they (trees, not people) were reduced to saplings. I was able to see only one large (30" diameter) Chestnut still standing on its trunk. It fell over 50 years ago, in 1976. I wish I had taken a photo.
I hope iNaturalist is in fact designed to record hundreds of items. I think weak observations is more of a burden on the identification community than volumes of easy ID’s. Rather than encouraging people to make fewer observations, I would hope iNaturalist would encourage people to make more and better observations.
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