Question About Audio Observations

[cthawley]

It’s totally fine to add a picture of the subject, but I would guess that many users might just look at the pic, especially if it is “first”.

Staff have asked users not to upload spectrograms for a variety of reasons, here’s one response from them:

@kueda

Observation photos are intended and assumed to be photographic evidence for the recent presence of an organism, i.e. they should communicate what you saw in the field. Not spectrograms, not habitat shots, not pictures of the sky to show what the weather was like, not photos of photos, just actual photos that show someone what you saw, and hopefully look like what others might see when seeing similar evidence for the recent presence of the same taxon. We make that assumption when showing observations photos on the taxon page, when training our computer vision system, when sharing data with partners like GBIF, etc., and all those non-organism shots break that assumption and cause us to use and share inaccurate information (we claim something is a photo of an organism when it’s actually a spectrogram).