New Annotation: Evidence of Presence

I found out if I annotate for Evidence of Presence “molt” it automatically goes to a collection project for molts that @onidiras created. Hooray!

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I would like to use ‘nest’ for all kinds of birds homes, including ‘burrows’.
In Spanish, my native language, a ‘nido’ is the home of a bird, even if it is a cave in the mountain as in vultures.
Maybe is the same in English?

Regarding galls, aren’t they eggs, or larvae? The ones most common here are the oak and rose galls that have tiny baby gall wasps inside.

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Yes a gall is a swelling of plant tissue caused by the grub living inside it, but it’s not equivalent to the grub. It’s something like a home or a feeding mark but I guess it’s probably its own thing.

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To add, galls can also be formed and inhabited by (adult) mites, aphids or even bacteria and fungi (if the term ‘gall’ includes those swellings as well) - so these structures are not necessarily the homes of developing larvae

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Leaf-mines and galls would be particularly helpful I think.
For anyone who doesn’t know these, its impossible to discern if it’s a fly or a moth or something else, so it ends up stuck in Winged Insects where neither Lepidoptera or the relevant Diptera identifiers even see it.

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This was a great addition! Any chance nest/burrow could be added, or is it covered by ‘track’?

It seems like a few virologists have found the site. So many parasitoids are evidence of the presence of a virus which they all possess. It seems to me that adding evidence of presence of virus is better than trying to get everyone to duplicate records of every parasitoid that relies on them. It starts with Cotesia and ends with every idiobiont parasitoid? Most wasps and some flies…

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That isn’t unlike a number of other cases in which the same photo is used for multiple observations—a tree and a vine; a flowering bush and the nest built in it. When I do this, I enter a note with a link to the other observation in the description of each observation.

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9 posts were split to a new topic: Evidence of Presence: A Lot

I really think “fur” (or “fur/hair”) needs to be added as a choice to the Evidence of Presence field for observations of mammals.

In the Rockies and Cascades, sightings of mountain goat fur are much more common than sightings of goats themselves. (Here’s an example.) They’re expanding their ranges in southern Washington and central Oregon, and fur snagged on trees is one way to track their progress. As long as these observations are being posted anyway, why not expand the “Evidence” tag to cover them?

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Moving EoP to the bottom of the Annotations list would resolve some errors in Annotations entries.
When you populate this annotation, it automatically creates another EoP line. But not quickly… by then the user is trying to fill in a different annotation. As the screen refreshes with the additional EoP, everything shifts and the user ends up accidentally picking the wrong Life Stage. (Or some other error, but this is the most common one.) Usually without knowing it.
I’m seeing a lot more errors in Life Stage since EoP was added. I now populate that one last to avoid the problem. Putting it at the bottom of the list would help everyone avoid it.

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That’s good feedback - right now the annotations are automatically shown in alphabetical order.

I assume you’re referring to using your mouse to add observations on the actual observaiton page, not with the Identify page? Here’s a screen recording of me annotating an observation on its page - does this match the speed of what you’re seeing? I’ve got a pretty fast internet connection so I’m curious how that affects the speed of a new EoP annotation row being added.

Is it possible we could be allowed to add EoP annotations appropriate for any active ID and not just the CID? For example say, hypothetically, I find a bone which has been accidentally ID’d to ‘Fungi’ and I add an ID to ‘Vertebrates’, the CID is now ‘Life’ so the only annotation which is available ‘Sex’ so I would have to remember to come back and add EoP:Bone when I get a notification that the CID has moved to at least ‘Vertebrates’

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Thank you for the reply @tiwane!
Yes - annotating my own observations on the observation page.
If your recording is true to the timing, then my update experience is much slower. I’m supposed to have a pretty fast speed for my area (everything’s relative), and I’m using a wired connection trying to make the most of what I have. I am attaching a screen capture from a speed test.
Honestly, this isn’t the only update problem I’m experiencing. When I finish annotating an observation and use the arrows to move to the next, it glitches. I’m annotating that next observation, and suddenly the screen is displaying the observation I navigated away from - and applying my changes to it! (The address box continues to display the address of the observation I was trying to annotate.) This happens a lot.
image

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Yeah, I suspect this goes to deeper isues within the Identify page and general scaling issues.

No, annotations are based on CID and I doubt that will change. Photo-level annotations is probably what we eventually need to do, although exactly how that will connect with the observation’s IDs would need to be figured out.

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See When clicking through observations quickly, two are combined into one.

@fluffyinca thank you! Yes, that’s what I’m seeing. I chimed in on that discussion with examples.

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Here are some potential Evidence of Presence values I’ve been thinking of adding, let me know what you think (but please be constructive). Each one shows the value, the applicable taxa, a possible definition, and examples of evidence for which it might be used.

Construction (Animalia) - Something built or excavated by an animal’s non-feeding activities.

Covers: nests of all kinds, burrows/tunnels, bowers, spider webs, ant hills, termite mounds, beaver dams, spider trapdoors and turrets, reefs/coral structures

Evidence of feeding (Animalia) - Evidence that an animal, which is no longer present, has fed. [kind of an ugly sentence…], mosquito bite

Covers: bites marks in leaves, kill sites, woodpecker holes, beetle galleries

Gall (Insects, Mites, Fungi, Bacteria…) - abnormal plant growth instigated by a parasite.

Covers: galls

Scratch or rub (Mammalia, or maybe just some mammal clades) - damage caused by rubbing or scratching.

Covers: bear rubs and scratches, deer rubs, etc.

Leaf mine (Pterygota) - feeding tunnel within a leaf.

Covers: leaf mines

Hair (Mammalia) - hair no longer attached to an organism

Covers: mammal fur


I still go back and forth about construction - the idea is to not use a bunch of different English terms (eg nest, burrow, web, bower, mound, hive, etc) that might be difficult or impossible to translate, but still have term that’s useful when going to a taxon’s photo browser (eg a bunch of web photos for a spider family or genus could be really helpful with ID).

There’s also some overlap, eg a leaf mine could also be evidence of feeding, but having those both be marked doesn’t seem like it would cause many problem (even though I’d be for marking only the best one).

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Agree

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I want this one

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