Tags and Notes - What and Why?

General
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Hello, I’m new to iNaturalist and have a couple basic questions. I did spend some time looking online for answers, but as often happens to me, my searches failed.

First, with respect to tags, how important is it to add them to a record? And what information would typically be included in a tag? ID, conservation status, time, and place are already in the initial upload, so I assume there is no need to tag such information. So what would be helpful? I’d like to make my records as useful as possible to other naturalists.

Second, notes. On other sites (eBird, instagram, flickr) I often provide some context with my posts - things like the circumstances of the sighting, ID info, local conservation issues, etc. Does this fit with the purpose of a note? Again, any thoughts, suggestions, etc. would be welcome.

Third, is it worth the effort? I am happy to provide tags and notes, but there’s nothing particularly special about my records, and I don’t think they are accessed much, so would tagging and noting by a worthwhile expenditure of time?

Best, Paul Jones, Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada

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Your take on AI generated notes in observation notes field
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I think your notes could be useful for you and for others, and providing context would be great. It’s something that I’m trying to remember to do more often. You never know when at some point in the future the context could actually be very useful.

In my experience, tags are mostly for personal use for looking up groups of my own observations quickly.

Annotations and Observation Fields would be more useful for the overall community, and some are specifically used to automatically include observations in Projects, etc.

Welcome to iNaturalist!

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Hi, welcome to iNat! I’ve been here for a while, so I’ll share what I’ve learned about these, but I think people use them in different ways.

Tags aren’t used very often in my experience, they could be used to categorize observations (things that came to a moth light, things found under cars), but usually projects are used for this purpose. Some might use tags to connect observations of the same individual (tracking the phenology of one tree over several years).

If you’re looking to add additional value to your observations, you might be better off adding annotations (flowering stage; adult or egg) or observation fields (there’s thousands(?) of options but some of the most generally useful are host plant or other interactions between species)

Notes can be useful for information that isn’t already in the observation (didn’t get a ventral picture, but the moth had a red belly; this plant is in a garden bed, but it was not planted by a human), or just things you want to share (it was raining, there were 500 frogs, here’s the whole story of me finding this).

It’s hard to know if anything is “worth the effort” (= used in research I presume?). Observation fields for interactions can make data for the GloBi site. Annotations for life stage and phenology fill up the charts on the species pages. These seem to be worth the effort to me, but everything varies.

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Thanks so much. That’s very helpful.

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If you are posting a lot of birds, one time it can be really helpful to leave notes is if you are posting something that is rare, especially if it’s something that is often confused with something else, and extra especially if it is a difficult ID.

In those cases, providing more context (such as how you made the ID, and/or links to other confirmed sightings of the same bird) can help to get it identified, but even just saying you know it’s rare can help prevent identifiers from assuming you made a mistake and trying to “correct” you incorrectly.

If that does happen, it’s not a huge problem, it just takes a little more time to get back to the correct ID. You can often avoid that with a quick note.

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Very helpful. Thanks.

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This is exactly what the Notes field is for, and people generally appreciate when you provide helpful context. “Found in a wildflower meadow on a sunflower plant” “growing near the base of a red oak tree” that sort of thing. You can also add all this stuff later on a desktop/laptop if you’re using the app to post the observation in the field. You can also bulk add/edit this stuff later, so you don’t have to click a bunch of buttons or type it all out for each post.

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For notes, it can be useful for identifiers if you describe features which can’t be/aren’t shown in the photograph. For example, this plant has (or doesn’t have) a smell (like garlic? like mint? mildly pleasant? strongly bad?) or a feel (like sandpaper? softly fuzzy?) I am less familiar with non-plants, but maybe the organism was making a sound you would describe in a certain way, or maybe it moved/behaved in a manner you could describe, or perhaps your photo shows only the creature’s top side but you were able to see a color or a pattern on the underside.

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I am a big fan of tags and I use them in a couple of different ways. You can search your observations for the tags and pull up all the observations with that particular tag.

  1. Frequent locations - I tag my observations with a name for the areas I frequently visit, whether its a specific road, park, creek, etc. It helps me keep track of where I make my observations and makes it easy if I need to pull up all the observations I’ve made at one particular spot. The map just labels it with city or county, but I like much knowing exactly which one of my local haunts it was.
  2. Collections - I collect fungi for DNA sequencing so I tag the ones I’ve collected (with…“collected” ha!). When I’ve packed it and it’s ready to go to the lab I delete “collected” and add “packed”, and then “packed” to “sent” when its on its way. This way I can pull up every observation that’s been collected but not yet packed, and so on.
  3. Any particular characteristics that I would love to remember or need for the future. If I’m wanting to keep track of everything “pink”, or “stripes”, or fungi with guttation, or “paint” if its something I want to paint later.

There are so many interesting and fun ways to use the tags!

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I use tags a lot to make observations easier to find in searches, some of that probably out of habit from doing it on Flickr when I first started posting photos online. I most frequently use it for locations, e.g. name of park, trail, or overlook. In addition to allowing for searches for places that don’t have place maps it has the advantage that it will also include observations with obscured coordinates or larger accuracy circles which fall outside the boundaries of smaller places. I’ve also used tags for grouping images from particular hikes or events to share via a search URL.

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I think of tags as labels I may want to search on in the future – parks, creeks, roads that you can’t search without the tag. Could be behavior, etc.

Notes I treat as more public – what I want the public to know about – the traits I saw, which organism in the photo the observation is about, the habitat, weather, etc., etc., etc.

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Notes can be useful for identifiers. I look at a lot of “unknown” observations - ones that the observer hasn’t given any ID. Photos of weird stuff with no explanation are the ones I hate! I would like to know the context - like where was it found (growing on a tree, lying on the ground, in water,…), or what size that thing was, or it is was hard or soft, or was it moving. All sorts of things that can’t be seen in the photo but which might help identify what it was.

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Notes can also be useful for things that don’t appear in camera - Hypericum hircinum, vegetatively, looks about the same as Hypericum androsaemum, but it smells bloody awful (supposedly like goats, but to me, it’s kind of like burnt electric motors) when you graze it - the other species smells of nothing to vaguely fragrant. Putting “smells awful” in the notes is helpful there! Ditto stuff like bird behaviour, or even linking to another observation (useful when you get two very similar species in one shot, it can be useful to add “compare x”).

I also use it for hosts (of parasites, gallers, foodplants), species associations (occuring near x, y, z), confirming a rare garden escape is indeed a wilding garden escape, or literally just whatever I’m thinking at the time of uploading. Occasionally that extends to a bad pun.

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As people have mentioned, observation fields are quite useful.
Unfortunately the can also be confusing on which field to use because sometimes there are multiple ones for the same thing.
This site gives a good overview over a bunch of useful and well established observation fields

https://inaturalist.nz/pages/extra_fields_nz

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Thanks so much everyone for all the helpful information. What a great community!

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Tags, according to the Help, can only be added by the observer. So, they can be helpful if you want to classify your observations and then use the Filter menu to narrow down to only those observations.

Notes: Yes! Add them! People read them. I have found that people interested in your observations either casually or because they are using your data like the information. And, other people will add notes/comments. I sometimes add notes about the circumstances surrounding an observation. I posted a hawk with a full crop and noted that. Birders like to talk about birds.

I have only been adding dragonflies/damselflies for the past few years so, I am often unable to identify them. I will use a family or even just “dragonfly” or “damselfly” as the ID. Then, I might add a note with questions about it. The Ohio Odonata Society members who use iNat for their research will answer.

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Yes, welcome!

As others have mentioned too, I use tags for extra things l might like to search for later. I try to always include the source of my geolocation information (since I often geotag DSLR photos from a GPS track). For sites I regularly observe at, I include the place name in the tag so I can easily search on it (even if some of the observations’ geolocations are not quite accurate).

For everything else, there’s annotations and observation fields, which are more useful for research.

If you’re not always photographing from the app, another useful feature of tags is when you upload via the website. If you add tags to your photos before uploading (eg a species name, or an observation field like Plant flowering=Yes), the iNat website uploader will automatically look through the tags in your photos for anything it understands and automatically add them to your iNat observations. It saves me a lot of time, as I often do the first pass of cropping and tagging on my computer before I upload to iNat.

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Welcome along!

Yes, like many have said, I use the notes for additional information: smells, on which something grows on (especially fungi benefit from this), or lengths (should remember to carry a measuring instrument with me), behaviour, weather, so on and so forth.

One I try to get into the habit of using, is the observation field. I just find it really poorly implemented. Basically I feel it should be sorta “standardized” tags to help with searches. Now, you just have to go guessing what you can add there and through which keywords… Unless I’m missing something.

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One thing you can do is check what projects your observations are being added to automatically. Then check their journal pages to see if there is any mention of what fields they may be looking for, and then use those. Some projects automatically add fields which you then just have to fill in, but I’m guessing these are projects you have to opt into.

For a project I help curate: when I understood how observation fields work, and how to get them with the data I download, I decided to check which ones were already being used by participants in our project. I selected a set of fields that covered the attributes of interest to our project (Insect Life Stage, Insect Host Plant, Nectar Plant, Count, Additional Observers, etc.), and worked out how to get these fields included in our data download. Then I started encouraging participants to add these fields (rather than other fields that covered the same attributes). I then created a journal entry in our project outlining this list of fields and their intended usage. I never had to create any fields - perfectly suitable fields already existed in iNat, and we don’t automatically add the fields to anyone’s observaitions. In contrast, I’ve seen other projects come in and create a whole suite of new fields specifically for their project when perfectly suitable ones already existed. If their participants use these new fields for attributes that my project is also interested in, I find I must either augment my download process to capture these new fields, or do without the information (and it’s a moving target - new projects with their own field lists crop up all the time).

This approach creates an atmosphere of competition vs one of collaboration, with each project trying to put their “stamp” on observations. If an observer’s observations go into multiple projects that use this approach, they will find themselves with a long list of fields automatically added to their observations, many of them covering the same basic attributes. Maybe I’m pessimistic, but my guess is that this will make it less likely that they will fill in any of the fields. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any easy way to call project curators out for this kind of “bad behaviour”.

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Maybe those multiple tags will be added to annotations one day. Then we have One to use for ‘this purpose’

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