I am pretty new to iNat and I have the a question on when I should or should not submit an observation.
Here is an example. I observe a Northern Cardinal at different time on same or different locations, for example, I saw the Cardinal last week in site A 3 weeks ago, I saw another Norther Cardinal last week in site B, then I saw a Cardinal yesterday in Site A. Should I submit 3 observations or not?
I think it makes sense to submit all 3 observations because it provides information about the presence of a species at different time and different locations.
Thanks also for the pointer to the previous post of similar topic. Before I posted my question in the forum, I did a search of “observation of same species”, for some reasons I did not see the previous post in the search results.
If it’s an organism (preferably wild), and you find it interesting or useful to document, or if you think someone else would find it interesting or useful to know about, then it is a perfect subject for an observation!
And that goes for frequency on the same organism, and also on the photos and angles to take, etc. If you can perceive there to be benefit to having 3 observations of the same organism on the same day and in the same place (ie is there something different and interesting about the 3 different observations), then that works too!
In some cases, observations made at the same place at different times (or at the same moment) may be related. You can use the observation notes field to indicate this, adding a link to the related observation if you wish.
I recently observed the hatching of some wasps. First I observed the eggs. Days later, in the same place, the first wasps. They were two observations, in the same place and at different times, but related to each other.
It is also very common to observe an insect on a flower (two observations in the same place at the same time). You can upload one observation for the insect and one for the plant (if you get a good enough image to identify both species).