New Annotation: Evidence of Presence

[teellbee]

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

@tiwane

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

[tiwane]

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 don’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. I’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 it’s not a big deal. It would definitely irk me, though, haha.

And thanks for the saying it probably shouldn’t be used for corals - I hadn’t thought of that.

@muir

Maybe this is a dumb question, but what does it matter if animal is present or not in observation for this annotation? Multiple EoPs are possible.

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

@murphyslab

A general trend that I’ve been observing on the usage of Track is that some might take it to be a more expansive term. Although you define track in a particular way,

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.

[schoenitz]

Thanks for the update, I’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.

[tiwane]

@schoenitz

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

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

[sbushes]

Nice!

Is there a consensus on using “track” for leaf mines now as well or…?

@tiwane

I don’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.

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 it’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 …as you say they are usually in the minority, so tend to get buried pretty easily.

[fffffffff]

Yes, track can’t be used for mines.

[matthew_connors]

@fluffyinca

I would say marking any eggs / egg fragments as “Organism”, “Life Stage: Egg” and “Dead or Alive: Cannot Be Determined” should be sufficient while we wait for more annotation options.

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 it’s best to leave it without an annotation for ‘Evidence of Presence’

[DianaStuder]

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 … ?

[fffffffff]

But it’s also a part that was secreted by adult bird, unlike shell that’s actually a part of dead mollusc “attached” to it.

[matthew_connors]

@matthew_connors

Moulting occurs in more than just reptiles and arthropods, and it would be good if it could be expanded to include those groups too (even if finding a moult from them is less likely than from reptiles and arthropods). Principally, everything in Ecdysozoa moults as far as I’m aware - on iNat this corresponds to the phyla Kinorhyncha, Nematoda, Nematomorpha, Loricifera, Onychophora, Priapulida, and Tardigrada - and several amphibians moult as well so it could be useful to expand it to them as well.

An excellent example of that here:

[Thunderhead]

Also deer scrapes and rubs.

[theorickert]

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. “construction: nest” 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. “plant damage” or “abnormal growth”). 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:

“regrowing skin parts” covers hair, feather, molt, …

“calcification” covers egg shell, snail shell, coral, … I would keep bone and tooth separate, but don’t know what to combine these with. What about turtle egg shell?

I see “leaf mine” as “evidence of feeding” not a “track”. Or is there any other type of feeding evidence from leafminer larvae? I wouldn’t see a problem if there is a different type of evidence from adults.

[natemarchessault]

I read through this quickly and admittedly I don’t frequently use annotations so this may be a poor suggestion.

It seems that “fur” 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 I’m not aware of) could fit into this category.

I don’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!

[tiwane]

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. That’s why we didn’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, you’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 I’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. It’s possible that might encourage people to choose it because it’s there, even if it’s not a good fit - let’s see how that plays out.

• Please give it a few days before critiquing, if you can, unless there’s a glaring issue.

[fffffffff]

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

[egordon88]

@Megachile @joshuacde @calconey how exciting!

[wildskyflower]

Nice! I still support Gall being available for State of Matter Life (would it be technically possible to do Life except certain descendants that aren’t gall forming?), but understand testing it first.

[carnifex]

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

[tiwane]

@fffffffff

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

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

@wildskyflower

Nice! I still support Gall being available for State of Matter Life (would it be technically possible to do Life except certain descendants that aren’t gall forming?), but understand testing it first.

I think it’s possible…I’ll see if I can test out some configurations on our Staging server.

@carnifex

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

Hmm, that might be possible, although it would be a one-time thing and wouldn’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 couldn’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.

[treichard]

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

I don’t always know which kind of organism causes a gall, so I’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.