Any chance feeding evidence will eventually get included in Evidence of presence? I’m looking at Yellow-bellied Sapsucker observations during the breeding period and a lot of observations are found south of the normal breeding range for the species. Turns out most of these observations are of its distinctive holes in trees. Being able to filter out these observations would be very helpful to focus only on observed individuals and infer the breeding range from observations.
In general, I think that we should have something in the Evidence of presence to filter out any observation where a species is not present at the time of the observation or where there isn’t a very very recent sign of its presence. Otherwise, it makes it more difficult to study phenology or how the range of organisms changes through time. I’m not necessarily suggesting that we should be able to just mark an observation as “organism absent”, but that we should have enough evidence types to categorize every observation where the organism is not seen.
Sorry for the late reply on auto-annotating. After discussion, we decided that retroactively annotating observations based on projects or observation fields, involves too much uncertainty when it comes to semantics (especially with gall, which I’ve seen used for observations of the host plants, for example), intention, and ownership and we won’t be retroactively annotating observations for gall. We likely won’t be doing it for future annotations as well.
FWIW I made a project to collect all observations annotated as galls, it currently shows 10,322 observations. To the best of my abilities I’ve periodically cleaned up the taxon I was most worried about (Fungi) and in my experience there have been a few hundred non-gall fungus observations annotated as galls but it hasn’t been a major problem. So many wonderful gnarled plant images in one place.