New Annotation: Evidence of Presence

@szucsich I think galls are in the listing Tony proposed:

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Thanks for all of the really helpful feedback. I finally had a chance to really dig through it (it took way too long for me to do that). I also made a few new values on our internal test server and tried them out (I wish we still had a public test server, it would be perfect for something like this).

Gall seems pretty straightforward. I donā€™t find it to be particularly useful when it comes to the taxon photo browser, as the evidence for most gall-forming organisms is the gall itself, but it would be good for gall collection projects.

Construction works pretty well for things like bird and wasp nests, beaver lodges/dams, termite mounds, animal burrows, etc. Iā€™m a little worried that people will be overzealous and annotate observations like this with Construction because it has a tiny amount of web/silk in it, which could dilute searches using that annotation, but maybe itā€™s not a big deal. It would definitely irk me, though, haha.

And thanks for the saying it probably shouldnā€™t be used for corals - I hadnā€™t thought of that.

Thatā€™s probably me trying to be too cute with this - definitely not a dumb question. Your suggestion would certainly simplify things and I donā€™t think would have much of a downside.

Yeah, I think that might be a case where broadening it would be helpful rather than trying to split things up into finer and finer pieces.

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Thanks for the update, Iā€™m glad there is progress on the construction issue and hope it will be an option for everybody soon.

I also preemptively annotated your spider as organism so you can rest easy there.

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Thanks! Although if construction is added as an option it could be added to my observation. Not a big deal, but I personally wouldnā€™t want to see photos of a spider speciesā€™ webs that barely included the web.

Nice!

Is there a consensus on using ā€œtrackā€ for leaf mines now as well orā€¦?

Similar to leaf mines, I think a really useful thing will be to be able to be able to utilise this (and an annotation for leaf mines) for the unknown ones trapped at coarser levels. We have good keys for leaf mines in Europe, but if you can filter for them itā€™s easier to go through a bunch at once than have to dip in and out.

It would also be helpful to be able to search for images within the taxon which are not tagged with gall to find images of the organism itself ā€¦as you say they are usually in the minority, so tend to get buried pretty easily.

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Yes, track canā€™t be used for mines.

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A bit late to the party, but I have to disagree - an eggshell is not an organism any more than an empty snail shell or an insect moult is an organism. The eggshell itself is non-living and was never alive, so itā€™s best to leave it without an annotation for ā€˜Evidence of Presenceā€™

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But a shell is permeable? And it was once part of a living organism.
The empty shell is a dead piece, like a bone or shed horns or fur or ā€¦ ?

But itā€™s also a part that was secreted by adult bird, unlike shell thatā€™s actually a part of dead mollusc ā€œattachedā€ to it.

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An excellent example of that here:

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Also deer scrapes and rubs.

A few ideas:

  • Since it is very important to use annotations correctly, it woud be useful to have an easy way to access instructions about each annotation, right on the observation page. Is that feasible? I picture detailed info.

  • Aggregating annotations across a large variety of taxons helps keep the list of annotations manageable. But the broad categories then can become cryptic. Maybe, the category name can be adjusted depending on the taxon level the observation is at, e.g. ā€œconstruction: nestā€ for birds.

  • When disagreeing with an annotation selected on an observation one can only click the thumbs-down sign. But how does that get noticed? I was lucky in one of my observations that someone alerted me with a comment. How to ensure most errors get corrected?

  • Leaving a category a bit fuzzy at a high taxon level may not be a problem (e.g. ā€œplant damageā€ or ā€œabnormal growthā€). I would expect that there will always be new things that someone wants to categorize. But the categories must be clearly separated from each other and it would be preferable that the categories are specific at species level.

  • on categories:

ā€œregrowing skin partsā€ covers hair, feather, molt, ā€¦

ā€œcalcificationā€ covers egg shell, snail shell, coral, ā€¦ I would keep bone and tooth separate, but donā€™t know what to combine these with. What about turtle egg shell?

I see ā€œleaf mineā€ as ā€œevidence of feedingā€ not a ā€œtrackā€. Or is there any other type of feeding evidence from leafminer larvae? I wouldnā€™t see a problem if there is a different type of evidence from adults.

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I read through this quickly and admittedly I donā€™t frequently use annotations so this may be a poor suggestion.

It seems that ā€œfurā€ could be lumped with others for a broader annotation that would cover various creatures. Just off the top of my head hair, feathers, antlers etc and maybe molts (although there could be value keeping them separate that Iā€™m not aware of) could fit into this category.

I donā€™t have a catchy title for it but the annotation would represent some part of the animal that was shed from the body during normal (or maybe not) life process.

Again, I know very little on annotations so please ignore if this makes no sense!

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OK, Gall is now a value for Evidence of Presence. Its definition is:

Deformed plant tissue outgrowth caused by a parasitic organism.

It should appear on observations in Animalia, Fungi, Bacteria, and Viruses, with the exceptions of Chordata, Echinodermata, Ctenophora, Cnidaria, Crustacea, Mollusca, Araneae, Odonata, and Homo sp.

Its keyboard shortcut is e then g.

It should be an option for collection projects and in the taxon photo browser.


A few things:

  • We decided to err on the side of making Gall available in more situations than might really be necessary. Thatā€™s why we didnā€™t choose to limit it to, say, just the known insect families that induce galls. Therefore if you make an observation of a gall and just ID it as Insecta, youā€™ll still be able to annotate it as a Gall. That would hopefully make it more likely to be found by a gall identifier who could make more precise ID.

  • I made exceptions for some broad categories that Iā€™m pretty certain never induce galls and/or are marine only. If any of those are mistakes, though, please let me know.

  • As of now, Gall is the only available annotation for Fungi, Viruses, and Bacteria. Itā€™s possible that might encourage people to choose it because itā€™s there, even if itā€™s not a good fit - letā€™s see how that plays out.

  • Please give it a few days before critiquing, if you can, unless thereā€™s a glaring issue.

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Why those taxa though? Galls are mostly made by insects and mites.

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@Megachile @joshuacde @calconey how exciting!

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Nice! I still support Gall being available for State of Matter Life (would it be technically possible to do Life except certain descendants that arenā€™t gall forming?), but understand testing it first.

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Would be great if observations inn projects such as European Plant Galler Faunistics or Leaf and Plant Galls could get automatically annotated

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Because some galls are caused by those other taxa, although yes, in my understanding most are caused by insects and mites. Weā€™ll see how it goes.

I think itā€™s possibleā€¦Iā€™ll see if I can test out some configurations on our Staging server.

Hmm, that might be possible, although it would be a one-time thing and wouldnā€™t affect observations added to those projects after we run the script.

That reminds me, I forgot to ask if there were any commonly used Observation Field that we could link directly to the Gall annotation, similar to how adding the the Roadkill: Yes Observation Field to an observation also annotates it as Dead. I couldnā€™t find any commonly used English observation fields that fit, but if there are any in other languages, or if I missed any English ones, please let me know.

I have been using the Gall Present observation field to annotate galls on plants:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/14140
Iā€™d appreciate Gall Present = yes to be auto-annotated as Evidence of Presence = Gall.

I donā€™t always know which kind of organism causes a gall, so Iā€™d want to have Evidence of Presence = Gall available for an observation with ID = Life if I were to fully adopt the new annotation option.

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