Just looking for some advice here from the perspective of identifying things: What’s the best way to handle observations you come across that have multiple photos each showing different species (e.g. a flower, a mushroom, a bug, and a moss), but somehow have managed to achieve research grade? Usual…

Are these photos of different observations rather than a fly on a flower? If the former, @marina_gorbunova seems to have a good solution. I often post observations of insects on flowers without identifying the flower/plant.

You will have to put an ID which encompasses all the photos (like “Plantae” if they are all plants or “life” if it is a true mix) and then when the pop-up appears, select the orange option for explicit disagreement. I did have an observer chew me out for this one time, so if the observer seems to be…

Thanks everyone for the suggestions! Yes, these are cases with what should be different observations that probably accidentally got combined into a single one. Each picture typically shows a different organism/species.

There’s some text that was written to inform/help observers fix these situations: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses#multiple (the responses could probably use some tweaking for tone; happy to take suggestions and implement changes on that wiki for people who aren’t curators)

Oh and I have a tutorial about how to split up photos that I like to paste the link for: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-fix-your-observation-with-photos-of-multiple-species/15096/

There are obviously as well those “Interaction” observations which we here in ZA duplicate and ID the interacting “active” and “passive” part and then link it with the “Project” Interaction (sAfr) https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&project_id=15477

I typically don’t give an ID but rather a comment that goes along the lines of: “An observation consists of a single specimen at a particular time only, yet you have multiple species within one observation. Please consider making separate observations for each of these photos.”

Funny you should mention that because this is my own “boilerplate” response as I mark those Life and/or “can’t improve”: variable species per photo https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-fix-your-observation-with-photos-of-multiple-species/15096

Same here. I mark them as specifically as I can given the diversity in the photos (e.g. plants, animals, or just ‘life’) and mark the observation as can’t be improved. This marks the observation as ‘casual’ when it gets more than one ID (e.g. if someone agrees with me that they are all plants). If …

Research grade obs with multiple photos showing different species

General

marina_gorbunova September 26, 2020, 4:14pm 2

Re-id them, mark them can be improved>yes if there’re many ids.

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Research grade obs with multiple photos showing different species

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