With that observation field along comes the description
`the subject is the plant host or the parasite’
And I found at least one plant observation with that field.
But, if the annotation of galls isn’t available for plants anyways, this shouldn’t be a problem
Great job adding the galls! But the annotation gall is missing for Iteomyia capreae, at least I can’t choose it
@tiwane
If you’re going to auto-annotate non-plant gall observations from traditional projects, I think it would be good to do a bunch of them.
As for Observation Fields to map, here are some to consider.
| Field | approx # obs |
|---|---|
| Gall Location | 5700 |
| Forms gall on | 3700 |
| Galliformers Code | 3500 |
| Animal traces (in part) | 500 |
| type of herbivory (in part) | 400 |
| Insect Galls | 350 |
| gall type | 60 |
| Gall present | 60 |
In English, but would you consider mapping Animal traces?
There are three values that would go to Track, one for Scat, one for Feather, one for Molt, one for Bone, and (as I mentioned in my previous post) one for Gall.
Thank you, it seems to be working now. It was in the Android app, which can be a bit shaky with the annotations sometimes, at least for me.
I was just reminded that annotations need to be made by a user, so we’re not going to run a script to annotate observations in projects. Yes, we could attribute the annotation to iNaturalist, but I don’t think that’s a great idea. So, unambiguous observation fields: yes we might, but traditional projects: no. We also don’t know if all of the observations in those projects are actually of galls.
I’ll do some investigating of obs fields and come up with an issue for our devs.
iNat records the person who adds an observation to a traditional project. That seems like the user to attribute it to.
It seems to me that if you’re willing to assume that someone has correctly added an observation field, you should also be willing to assume they’ve correctly added a project. Or am I missing some reason why observation fields should be more reliable than projects?
I just went through my gall pictures to add the new annotation and noticed that on insect galls I have to choose whether to annotate them as gall or organism. I have some where I cut the gall open to show the insects inside, so they actually show both. Gall people: Which one is the preferred one in such a case? Or should I duplicate the observation, one for each annotation, so the database has both?
Wouldn’t it suffice to annotate it as gall + the life stage (larva, pupa) of the insect? The latter annotation implicates that an organism was present at first place.
This solution would be more tricky to assign for mites found in galls, but for insects it would be straightforward in my opinion
Multiple evidence annotations can be added, just add both.
Oh yes, you are right - it’s working like plant phenology annotations. I’d still support to annotate the life stage as well, because that’s what I’d filter for if I want to look how gall inducers look like in their developmental stages
I see, I guess it just took too long for the second annotation line to pop up for me to notice. Thanks!
I think annotate it as a both if you actually have a picture of the organism, could help distinguish as most gall photos probably don’t contain the actual organism itself.
I’m not a gall researcher, but this is what I’d suggest. Unless you open the gall up, you don’t know which life stage the organism is currently at (could potentially be pupa, larva or maybe egg) or even if the organism which induced the gall is still there (it could have been consumed by a parasitoid, for example). And even if you did open up the gall, the larva or pupa in it could be a parasitoid.
All you know is that there is a gall, which is recent evidence of the organism that induced the gall.
Good point. A somewhat weak retort would be that the person wasn’t adding metadata to the observation, they were adding the observation to a project, which is different. But I don’t think that’s a particularly great distinction. ;)
This motivated me to do some spot checking of observations for some of the projects and observation fields you listed because we really don’t know. In my non-scientific analysis, there were more observations that would not meet the Gall annotation definition in projects than with the observation fields. But neither were perfect. Which kind of calls into question the entire idea of retrospectively auto annotating obsevations, IMO.
Or perhaps those people who bother to enter annotations will be savvy enough to realize that a few strands of silk are, at best, evidence of an unidentifiable arachnid. OTOH turrets are commonly used on iNat as evidence of Calif. turret spider, and intricate webs often do allow cognoscenti to provide useful IDs.
BTW, thanks for adding “Galls” as a category!
Spot on! A gall is evidence that a member of the gall-inducing species was present at one time–possibly several years ago, depending on the type of gall and where it was attached.
