As noted above by others: I look at the Alive or Dead field as irrelevant to the Evidence of Presence category. The subject of the photo is some sort of evidence of an animal, for which an ID can applied that indicates an animal was present. That evidence – track, scat, molt, etc. – is neither alive or dead.
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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.
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In the case of cow and calf, I would duplicate the observation and annotate appropriately. Unless that’s not recommended?
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I would like to see the addition of ‘Symptom’ or something equivalent.
People observing pests and diseases often post photographs of visible symptoms on the host plants/animals, but not the causal organism. Often for fungi/bacteria/viruses the causal organism is only visible by microscopy or lab testing.
It is an important distinction. Many plant/animal pathologists would make identifications based purely on symptoms, and whilst these can be diagnostic they are not guaranteed to be correct. As a taxonomist I want to see evidence of the actual organism, or at least an annotation saying ‘symptom’ only. This has recently been an issue in New Zealand with observations of the spreading Myrtle Rust disease.
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As stated in the original post, choose the best option or just don’t annotate at this point. I don’t think any of your examples really fit the current options so I’d just not annotate them.
Regarding the Alive or Dead debate: it might be best discused in a different thread, but I’m not sure the importance of that annotation merits it. It’s mostly used for finding roadkill and such, and I think the Dead value is really the only one that provides benefit.
Yeah, that would be great but it’s not something realistically implementable in the near future.
As @egordon88 said, best to make two separate observations for these cases. And as I noted earlier, it’s possible to add more than one Evidence of Presence value to an observation.
Sounds cool, but I would want it pretty taxonomically restricted.
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Duplicating the observation is the only way (now) to annotate both the cow and the calf. It seems a waste of computer space, though. I just choose one to annotate or leave that annotation blank.
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My preference is to leave the annotation blank if two life stages are shown. That way, on the life stage annotation graph, if a species is curated well, you can almost infer “multiple life stages” from the “no annotation” curve.
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Adding my support for a Burrow or Nest category. Some burrows like that of the gopher tortoise are distinctive enough to warrant such.
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No, that is the exact opposite of what I was saying. I’m saying that you can’t automatically have it fill in “organism” if you select “alive” because you could have seen that it was alive but did not get a photo of the organism, only the tracks. Yes, other people can’t verify that it is alive but someone could select this thinking that if they saw it alive that they should and then if it auto marked as organism that would be incorrect.
I was also thinking songs/calls. If you have an audio recording then you know it was alive, but does that count as an organism or will there be a future evidence of presence for song/call?
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That is not incorrect, you always can leave a note you saw it, but if you add organism, it will show in search for organism, while it’s not there.
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If you duplicate an observation and use the same photo, it doesn’t duplicate the photo (i.e. waste space). The photo becomes associated with more than one observation. Example: https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/13293297
But having separate photos (one of calf, one of cow) in separate observations and annotating each one isn’t really a waste of space if your files are not large. I do this for male and female birds:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/82944783
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/82944780
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Well, we should believe users, otherwise we can’t verify any info they provide, they can change EXIF, etc. For me it is more of a searh problem than evidence problem, if I search for alive/not known it should show everything but dead (it includes tracks), if I search for organism, it should have an organism in it.
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I also have questions how to annotate audio recordings.
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I’ve been using “track” for leaf mines because they record a history of the animals’ movements.
I would also label “track” for slime trails and radula tracks.
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in the case of birds, may be useful to add the value ‘Nest’ to the list of ‘Evidence of Presence’
This could also apply for some fish.
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I saw this addition and thought great but we do need a category for ‘homes’. That is: bird nests; other veterbrate burrows; insect structures (such as ant nest entrances, Lepidoptera shelters etc).
Many of these are identifiable to species and are often identified to species on iNat without any other evidence of the organism.
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For those asking for some sort of “home” annotation value, I think the most useful thing you can do to push this forward is to answer some of the questions Tony outlined in the original post.
- Should one single value apply to all types of homes, or should there be one for nest, one for burrow, one for hive, etc.?
- Exactly which taxa should this apply to (especially if multiple different values)?
- What should this value be in English (e.g. “domicile”, “construction”), and is it easily translatable to other languages?
Try to think of how edge cases should be handled, for example a deer bed or a bower.
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I’d be happy calling all the things you mention “homes” or domiles or constructions. (deer beds, bowers, nests, burrows, hives, etc.) People will be able to tell which kind from the species, in general. I’m not even unhappy calling a beaver dam a “home” since beavers that make dams do so to produce the ponds they live in.
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The definition of track is “Impression in ground or snow made by an organism.”, it’s really not meant to cover leaf mines.
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btw it’s shown there if you point cursor on it, far from being intuitive to find it out:
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