Many of us have been using “Observation Fields” to capture the information that is now (or in the future might be) available in the “Evidence of Presence” annotation. One of the fields I use most frequently is “How was this Detected?” I use this whenever I have an observation that does not depict a complete organism. Since this field has been in use for many years, the frequency with which each of its options is used can be a guide as to which of these options should/could be available in the “Evidence of Presence” annotation.
How was this Detected?
Found Remains (used in 24,084 observations)
Track/Sign (6,272)
Scat (3,978)
Found Feather/Fur/Moult (1,691)
Found Nest (1,479)
Observation by Sight (1,278)
Observation by Sound (408)
Evidence of Feeding (319)
Scratching/Scent Post (113)
Observation by Smell (2)
As shown above, I believe there is a need for something like “Found Remains” or “Partial Remains.” Using the combination “Alive or Dead” = “Dead” plus “Evidence of Presence” = “Organism” doesn’t seem to fit for body parts (e.g., a deer leg bone with skin & fur, a decapitated mouse, a bird wing covered in feathers, a carcass with only tail and fur, a smashed newt). The definition of organism is: “a whole with interdependent parts, likened to a living being.” So if we only have part of an organism, is it still an organism?
For bees we have a lot of nest observations so “nest or burrow” would be helpful. Would a leaf cut from a Megachile sp. belong to that category?
And definitely “leaf mines” are their own beasts.
I’m of the impression that some annotation for fruit of a plant could be useful. Coconuts washed up, fruit in rainforests that are photographed off the tree. And so on.
I’d prefer just to have Life stage = seed for those scenarios. The adult that made that coconut could be a very long way away so the coconut isn’t evidence of the presence of an adult nearby.
(I would like a life stage annotation option for plants. Just seed, juvenile, adult would be great, with pollen and spore being excellent additional options for the right taxa. I’m not sure why only animals get the love in the Life Stage annotation.)
For question 2, yes definitely a moult! I was thinking about what constitutes a moult the other day - oddly enough an empty pupa is actually a moult! Would an empty insect egg be considered a moult?? I don’t know enough about insect physiology to say but it definitely seems possible.
For question 1 I am not completely sure. I would probably say no, and I’d say “burrow” or something similar (probably “domicile” or “construction” as discussed above) will be added as a possible annotation in the future.
There isn’t a value for burrows, nests, or other homes or constructions, so don’t add an Evidence of Presence annotation to them at this time.
The definition of molt is “Discarded skin or exoskeleton.” (see original post in this thread). Pretty sure an egg doesn’t fit that definition, although I’m not an entomologist.
To me fur is analogous to feather - something the animal extrudes and (eventually) drops but is not really a part of the organism like, say, a lizard’s dropped tail. Fur was actually in my original spec for this annotation but the feedback was that it’s probably particularly useful. I have nothing against adding it, but as I said in the original post, we wanted to go with the most broadly useful and least ambiguous values for the initial rollout.
I’m not sure if that was the right call but it seemed better than rolling out with a lot of more niche or ambiguous values which might create more issues and be more difficult to pull back. But as I said previously, since most of us here are data nerds (including me! I love annotating observations!) and we want to fill out everything we can, it might lead to people add a value which doesn’t really fit.
Yep, also not everyone reads these threads. Especially if they’re from non-English speaking countries. Today I saw an observation of a gecko in Italy that had been annotated as ‘alive’ and ‘organism’. Judging from what I’ve read here in this thread, the ‘organism’ annotation doesn’t make much sense in this case.
I’ll remove the track annotation from my holes in the ground. But I’d really love a category like ‘home’ eventually… ;-)
Ticking ‘organism’ for any organism shown in a photo would mean we’d have to annotate just about everything as ‘organism’, regardless of plant, fungus, animal. The way I read this thread, however, would reserve the ‘organism’ tag to such things as (for instance) the parasite that causes, for instance, some growth on a plant.
So, this message says most gallers’ observations show no organism and annotating those that shows them as organism will be helpful for others to find how they actually look.
Correct. Makes sense to me. Mark something as an organism to provide extra info=value. On the other hand, if 95% of observations are of organisms that are patently organisms anyway, such an annotation does not add extra value.
It can help to filter them out as even though most observations are of organism, there’re those of their tracks, etc. and most of such interesting ones are not annotated, the more annotation we add, more useful they become, if we do it sparcely it doesn’t represent what actually people observe, it’s pretty same as when alive/dead was added, most things seen are alive, but if we don’t have them annotated we have no true data about it.
I sure do see your point. I’m just worried that, given the large number of observations that aren’t annotated at all, annotating every organism as living organism will just be the opposite extreme. Perhaps that’s just me, but I’d find such annotations as ‘juvenile’ or ‘molt’ much more useful.
