Our shadow warriors, an appreciation post

Wait, we can put aliens on iNat? How do I choose location not on Earth?

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I didn’t even know this was a thing :flushed: that’s pretty cool, when did they add this?

I’m not sure, but that feature has been around since I first heard of iNaturalist (so around a year and a half - 2 years at the minimum)

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a long time ago, the feature already existed early 2019, so was added before that

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My idea was that it helps other IDers, so they can skip empty observations altogether. So far I applied it only to obs that lacked everything (ID, media, comment, notes). I think I know how such obs happen: one wants to take pictures of a bird or insect, opens the mobile app, starts working and the beast flies away. If one isn’t careful, one has created an empty observation (that’s one of the reasons I use the camera app for everything, then import the image files into inat).

Where is ā€œgall landā€? I sometimes see blobs on leaves, but I have no idea if these are animal galls, fungal growths, viral diseases or something else, so I just skip them. Is there a project similar to ā€œBeach Blobsā€ or ā€œLarvae of Endopterygotaā€ where I can dump such obs so people can sort them out?

It is already possible for IDers to exclude observations without photos or sounds, so it isn’t necessary to use the DQA in this way and can actually be harmful. For instance, some users upload observations without media and add photos/sounds later. However, they may not notice that a DQA downvote has been used on their observation and not counteract it when they add their media. If that happens, a totally fine observation may languish in Casual grade because of a DQA vote that is incorrect. These types of situations are uncommon, but I do find them when I ID Casual observations.

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In North America, there’s the Galls of North America project. Off iNat, there’s the Gallformers.org website, which has lots of information on galls of the U.S. and Canada.

But I suspect from your observations that you are in Europe, so those probably won’t help, except to give you a general idea of what galls look like. Maybe try this Europe Galls umbrella project?

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Yes, I’m in Europe, but I have only observed one such thing in question (it turned out to be a fungus, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/164443674). I’m asking mainly because from time to time I add coarse IDs to global unknowns (adding IDs like Brassicaceae, Aves etc., some 14k+ so far). Blobs on some beach get thrown into ā€œBeach Blobsā€, and unclear caterpillar-like animals into the identically intended ā€œLarvae of Endopterygotaā€ (which I created a few days ago). These projects are essentially morphologically defined groups (at least the first, the other is a consequence of Inat’s taxonomy missing the clade) where one can dump things that aren’t related but look the same, for other people to sort out later. I’ll look at the gall projects when I see something for them.

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I live in a very seasonal area with snow so a quirky iNat thing I do is look out for observations where the background vegetation clearly doesn’t match the observation date. Usually it’s just an unintentional error that the observer fixes quickly after I comment, and I remove my DQA vote for ā€œincorrect date.ā€ This is easiest for observed mammals that typically would be hibernating or plants that wouldn’t be flowering or leafed out, etc. Observation date and location seem like the ā€œeasiestā€ things to be sloppy with on iNat / the ā€œhardestā€ things for others to validate, so I like the obscure detective work of finding observations that merit a little more attention and questioning to improve accuracy beyond just taxonomic accuracy.

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I am so happy to do it!

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Project-/geography-independent place: ID as Life, annotate as Gall. Or if you can get it to Arthropod vs Fungi, Gall annotation is enabled in those too! :)

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Yes!!! Thank you to the makers of those two fields, I always make sure to add them to observations I identify!

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Yes! This. I always forget to annotate my observations because I take the photos on my phone and upload through the app.
I know I should do it more thoroughly, but I usually don’t have my laptop with me and by the time I have access to it I have forgotten about it…

So I’m really grateful to those who do it!

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And I was worried that I would come off like an ā€œinsufferable know-it-allā€ for doing that. I guess I should just not worry about it, and keep annotating! :innocent:

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You definitely do not! I’m always happy to see filled out annotations, especially those I didn’t know. I learned to distinguish male and female for a few species that way. :D

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Agree! Especially as all the (illegal) wildlife trade observations are quickly marked as casual as well, despite not being casual observations at all.

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I do a bit of all this, but also (rarely): I choose one or more photos to illustrate a taxon that doesn’t have any (or I replace the existing ones with better ones when they are posted).
And I’d also like to say a few words of congratulations for any interesting observations (new to the country or region, not seen for a long time…).

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I quite enjoy IDing unknowns to kingdom or order and helping introduce new naturalists to the site. It’s an easy thing for me to do as someone who’s not very confident with my ID skills.

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