OK, I know this is not the answer you wanted to hear, but we talked it over and Observation Fields were designed to be a place that iNaturalist doesn’t exert much influence over. It’s user-controlled and we’re not going to step in here as far as organizing and standardizing things.
So I’m going to close this, but note that:
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I’ve submitted a GitHub issue to make observation field search results be ranked by the number of observations a field has been used with, to at least bring up the more often-used fields from a list of fields with duplicative functions. I’m hoping this will cause some to be more used than others.
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I’ve also posted an Annotations topic in General as a way to get some more standardized metadata fields available for certain taxa. I know this is something we dropped the ball on in 2017.
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I’ll add your requests for better Obs Field search options to our team document for our planned upgrade of Search.