This highlights an issue I’ve raised in another message board thread about annotations: I sometimes wish annotations applied to individual photos (rather than the observation) AND that multiple annotations were possible.
As I wrote in the other thread, I have felt the want/need for animal observations and the categories of ‘Sex’ and ‘Life Stage’ to be treated the same as plant phenology categories, where more than multiple annotations are possible (i.e., you can choose evidence of Flowering AND Fruiting). So, if a moose cow and calf is observed, I would like to annotate adult AND juvenile. If I photograph a moth laying eggs, I want to annotate adult AND egg.
I think “evidence of presence” might be the same way. If I observe a cicada that is sitting next to a molt it has just emerged from, I would like to annotate organism AND molt. If I make an observation with multiple photos, some with the emerged adult only and some of the molt it has emerged from, I would like to annotate each individual image accurately.
edit: to clarify, I think addressing this kind of complexity (multiple annotations, changing annotations from observations to photos) is secondary to the effort introduced in this thread – establishing and refining clear categories of presence.