There is a water beetle with just two observations on iNaturalist, different places, different dates, same observer, supported by an excellent textbook-standard photo. But it is the same photo for both observations, and the date on the photo suggests it was taken about 4 years before either observation. I have commented on them but no response from the observer, who seems not to have been on iNaturalist since 2023. So I have flagged them as failing on “Evidence accurately depicts organism”. Is that the correct response? Because I now see there are other species which have had the same treatment by this observer.
My “means-well” assumption would be that the observer had the photo in their backlog from before they joined iNat (without metadata), they forgot where/when it was taken, and they accidentally uploaded it on two different occasions with two different recollections as to when the photo was from. Or it could be fake/AI. I think I’d mark date and location incorrect, personally, since at least one of the two observations has to have the wrong date and location. If they clarify that one of the two was in fact correct later, they can always counter those votes. This also has the same effect of the observation becoming casual, but without making an “Evidence accurately depicts organism” vote that explicitly accuses the user of faking the images.
Unless I have some evidence that both observations are incorrect, I generally assume that the earlier dated of two observations is correct, and use “Incorrect Date”. In this case with different locations, though, it seems hard to be sure which of the two (if either) is correct. I could see the case for using incorrect date or incorrect location in a case like this, but I wouldn’t use “Evidence accurately depicts organism” as this is not the purpose of that field, see:
A little more about the situation: The photo has almost full data printed within it as part of the image - date, location, map reference, altitude. It just lacks collector and determiner to give it everything you would expect on a museum label. The location does match one of the iNaturalist observations but the date of the photo doesn’t match either of the iNaturalist obs. So where the location is a match., I have flagged it as date is wrong. And the other one I have flagged both date and location are wrong. Obviously this would all be clearer if I gave the name of the beetle but that would identify the observer and I am mindful we are not supposed to do that.
In a somewhat similar case, I saw the same leaf photo being used for two observations of different flowers. When I questioned it, the observer said she forgot to take leaf photos of the second plant but re-used the photo “since they were the same.” I urged her not to do this and explained that it would make all her future observations questionable. I hope she got it! I think it was a well-intentioned act, and maybe it was in your case, too, but of course it compromises the value of the observation.
This seems reasonable to me.
In the case of
I think it would be fair to use the “single subject” DQA if it seemed like there was the wrong species together.