The fruiting bodies of fungi change in appearance over time. I will fairly often return to a mushroom over several days to document how it changes. Should I enter the subsequent observation days as separate observations or add the new photos to the original observation? Or both, or something else?
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If they’re on separate days, it’s best to make a new observation.
Personally I’ll use a comment or edit the description to “link” the observations together, but you can also use an observation field or tags. More details on using an observation field for this kind of thing here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/using-the-field-similar-observation-set-for-linking-observations-of-lepidoptera-when-raising-on/1018
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I was just thinking about this, because I also return to the same observation and check to see if anything has changed… not just for fungi, but plants and so on.
Until now I have been adding the later images into the previous observation and making note of it, thinking it would help not to inflate the “counts” of a given thing, but I can see how making it a new observation with links to the old ones is better now.
The same individual in large, uncoordinated collections like this may be observed by many people anyway, especially in public places, so people looking at the count data already (I assume) know how to deal with that.
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Yep no worries about multiple observations of the same thing! Some off my backyard plants are very heavily iNatted :)
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If it is the same individual, I use the “Same specimen over time” field (but can’t find again the page explaining it). The meaning is stronger than “Similar observation set”, which I would use for instance for unidentified observations that are likely the same species.
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Oh wow, I had no idea that this existed! I’ll have to figure it out.
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