I’ve enjoyed the ID-a-Thon and the prompt to ID Unknown observations even to very high levels such as Phylum or Class, in order to increase the likelihood they’ll be seen by people who can ID them properly. For an amateur such as myself, this has been empowering - I feel like I’m contributing something and have seen several of the IDs I’ve tagged at very high taxonomic levels then get IDed by people who know a lot more than I do.
Like everyone else, I am seeing a lot of Unknown observations that cannot be identified - such as straight-up landscape shots, or, frequently, grab-bag observations (likely by an inexperienced user) containing several photos of wildly different organisms. Or rocks. Is there a way to tag these, so they all end up in some place together where they can then be further reviewed or filtered out somehow? What are best practices around observations such as these - or are there best practices? Going back in Unknown, I’m seeing a lot of older observations of these types.
I’m sure this must have been covered here on the forum, but I’m having trouble finding posts about it and I’m curious what people think in light of the ID-a-Thon that is currently underway.
If there are multiple different species in a series of photos, I’d leave a note for the observer asking them to split the observation and try to come back in a couple of weeks or so to mark the observation ‘not a single subject’ in the DQA - though if it’s an old observation and the user doesn’t seem to be active, I might just use the DQA straight away (but still leave a comment in the hope that they’ll come back to fix it). If they do split the observation, you’d then need to go and untick that box if there is more than one photo of the remaining organism, and add an ID if you can.
Rocks should be marked ‘no’ in ‘evidence of organism’, potentially also with a note that iNat is for living or recently living organisms (or related constructions, tracks etc.), not rocks, fossils etc. There’s a help page you could link to on the topic but I don’t have the link handy.
Landscape shots… are a difficult one, since we have no DQA to remove such photos. I guess there’s normally at least some plants present, so just ID to the lowest level you can and hope the next identifier will agree and tick ‘as good as it can get’ to get it out of Needs ID. If it’s only sea and sky, there’s no evidence of organism, so DQA as above.
Well, we have “Hinweis auf einen Organismus?” which roughly translates to “evidence of organism?” I find myself ticking “no” on that quite often. I don’t bother identifying “some tree” in a landscape shot just to have an ID for the sake of it. When the user is inactive or unresponsive, I simply mark “no evidence of organism.”
The same goes for pictures of the ground. You might see moss, grass, or lichen, but the observer has identified it as a butterfly or bird. I could ID that to “moss” or “fungi” instead of saying there is no evidence of the insect in question, but usually I don’t. In terms of quality, those observations often don’t contribute much and just end up stuck at “Poales” or something similar.
I often “think” that I get a feel or vibe from someones observation. When the observer didn’t try - why do I go beyond my usuall efforts.
Counterexample:
A landscape shot as habitat shot for a bird. For many this counts as bird observation, others start IDying plants in the image and then there is me ticking: No evidence of organism because the observer did not intend to end up with a plant observation but instead needs to learn that his observation is not identifiable (and that habital shots are not the prefered observation method)
For those - I Mark as Reviewed and find the next one. I will lean on a Kingdom Disagreement if the observer’s stated intention is The Beetle and someone IDed the daisy. IDo or IDon’t depending on the obs.
With a conspicuous lawn or hayfield (anything that is clearly mowed periodically), I add an ID to Poaceae (grasses) and mark as captive/cultivated to get it out of the needs ID pool. If it’s a cityscape, an ID to Homo sapiens (humans) would also work for quickly moving it out of the needs ID pool, but only do so if there’s truly nothing else that’s identifiable.
Alternatively, you can give other landscape shots without obviously cultivated features or a blurry bird a broader ID of Magnoliopsida (vascular plants), but it would take a second ID before you can send it to casual with a vote for “the ID is as good as it can be.”
I don’t like using “No evidence of organism” for observations that have evidence of organisms – distant, unidentifiable organisms. I prefer to ID as “Plants” or some other broad category and (sooner or later) use “No, its as good as it can be” to get rid of it.
If one of the plants in a landscape photo is actually identifiable to genus or species, I’m perfectly happy with adding that ID, sometimes specifying where the in the photo it is, especially if it’s an older observation. For newer ones, I may ask the observer which plant to use as a target in hopes of teaching how to use iNaturalist, but sometimes not.
I would strongly encourage you to not take this approach to identifying unknowns. “Some tree” can be identified down to species level even from a distance. Same with grass down below(most grass can be identified down to genus level even without fruits/flowers, and subfamily can go to RG).
There’s a balance here though. As the identifier, we can’t often know what the intended organism is, especially if there’s more than one. I’ve left comments for observers, and they never respond, meanwhile someone else will make an executive decision on what to identify in the photo, and then at that point, the DQA on “shows more than one organism” can’t be edited to reflect the situation. And there’s a certain point, going through unknowns, where it is truly exhausting to try to guess what the target organism was intended to be when there’s a massive landscape of stuff.
The DQA “shows more than one organism” is meant for observations where each photo shows a different organism, not one photo where multiple organisms are present (otherwise there would be few observations that meet this requirements, since most photos include multiple organisms besides the focal organism).
In any case, it should not be possible to use the DQA for observations where the subject is ambiguous – this DQA is deactivated if there is only one media item.
A single DQA vote can always be cancelled by countervoting “yes”.
That’s life. That’s nature. Unless you take the bug home for a posed studio portrait - or you use photo software to blur out the surrounding background of biodiversity and habitat.
I would like a DQA for landscape / scenery - where there is no obvious subject, needs to go to Casual. For example we have a vegmap project - which is difficult to ID within iNat’s guidelines https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/vegmaphoto-s-afr Thousands of obs waiting for that Landscape DQA.
Across iNat - lots of oh wow beautiful scenery, but what do you want to ID here. Such a ‘dim’ response. Where is your sense of wonder ?
It might be a dim response, but whether I like it or not, that’s how the website is set up. And without an observer saying what they want to ID, we end up with messy observations like one I ran into yesterday, where the ID is stuck at plants bc some folks are ID’g the moss, some folks are ID’g sometime else, and the observer never clarified.
We can’t complain about the backlog of ID’s stuck at unknown, “life” bc of kingdom disagreements, or at kingdom if we don’t have a means of addressing multiple organisms in a photo and observers who aren’t clear about what they are ID’g.
An observation I asked for clarity on got none, and someone else tagged it as a plant, but it’s also got a snail in it. I’m not going to create a kingdom disagreement by putting a gastropods ID on it, but we then lose that data point from the photo.
No, and I don’t really think we need one. There are other ways to get rid of such observations, like ID them to plants and then (if there’s another ID on it), No, it can’t be improved. (And you can bet that if there were an annotation for more than one organism in a single photo, some one would start getting rid of flower pictures with an insect. Or maybe I’m just too pessimistic at the moment.)
This data point would also be lost if the observer had chosen to focus on the plant rather than the snail. It is not a problem specific to IDing unknowns.
This is pretty basic to how iNat is designed – an observation is for one species (one individual organism). Most photos will also contain other organisms, unless the organism is photographed in an artificial context like a container. It may not always be desirable or feasible to try to identify all the other organisms in the photo.
There have periodically been feature requests to allow some way to identify multiple organisms in an observation in order to recover these lost potential data points, but this would require redesigning pretty much the entire infrastructure, so I doubt it is likely to happen.
I have found that most of the time IDers will respect the first ID unless there is a compelling reason to ID something else (e.g. observer’s choice of focus) even if they personally think something else in the photo would be more interesting or more IDable. Because otherwise you end up with observations stuck in “life” and nobody wants to waste their time IDing for that to happen. It is possible that at the moment there are more than the usual number of people looking at recent unknowns and more of them are inexperienced IDers, hence there is a greater potential for miscommunications or lack of coordination.
Most of us do have certain IDer biases – e.g., a plant person might pay the most attention to the flower and overlook invertebrates on or around the plant, while an insect person will notice the insect visiting the flower and a gastropod person will notice the snail on the stem. This is why it is best to encourage observers to enter an initial ID themselves so that they can indicate what they are interested in. But if they don’t and if they don’t indicate a preference when asked, choosing something that seems like it has a good chance of getting a fairly specific ID is a valid course of action.