I just started the project ‘Plant Parasites of Alaska’ to help myself organize a variety of distantly related groups (mostly fungi, insects, and mites) that alter plants. My main frustration is that I have not been able to manually add observations to the project.
An example:
Class Exobasidiomycetes is a taxon of fungi that infect plants, and is included in my project. I took a photo of a plant that I suspect is infected by a fungus (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/168604922), but I’m not sure what kind, so to be conservative I left the identification as ‘fungi’. It was not included automatically in my project because I did not select ‘fungi’ in general as a part of my project (for obvious reasons). I cannot add this observation manually because it is a collection project.
This is a real bummer - it would be great to be able to include observations of plant parasites, even if I don’t know what they are.
Anything I can do about this?
I don’t really want to start an umbrella project because I don’t want to compare multiple projects, and would rather have this all in one place (as well as have the added benefits of a collections project such as graphics and a leaderboard).
Perhaps this would better go into feature requests: set a rule in place that project admins can manually add observations overriding project requirements.
If you want to manually add observations, which you’ll probably have to be doing as you’re looking only at specific taxa, then you’ll have to make a Traditional Project instead of a Collection Project.
Admins can change a Traditional Project to a Collection Project, but I’m not sure about the reverse.
@tiwane - do you have anything to offer, or a potential solution?
Agreed - if you want the ability to add observations manually, you’ll need to use a traditional project. Adding observations manually isn’t compatible with how a Collection Project works (which is basically as a saved search).
Yeah, you’d want to use a traditional project. It’s not possbile to turn a collection project into a traditional project, so just delete your current project (to free up the name) and make a new traditional project.
Thank you for the advice, I didn’t realize traditional projects were a thing, hidden away at the bottom of the projects page.
I don’t think that will be ideal either, because as I understand it I cannot bulk-add observations to a traditional project, and I cannot add other peoples’ observations without them joining the project. I’ve found that despite being incomplete (missing observations with lower taxonomic resolution that don’t qualify yet), I’ve learned a lot from seeing other people’s observations that were automatically added to my collections project. It would be a lot of outreach and campaigning to get people to know and upload to my plant parasites project, so I guess I’ll keep the collections project for now and maybe make a separate traditional project for my personal unidentified observations.