This is a fairly complex question – do you intend to discuss entering the most specific answer they can give, such as “plant” or “insect” ? I like the general concept ,especially in the context of an in-person presentation after you’ve discussed the basics.
Considering the length of debate we have here on some of these topics–including some threads that are currently open–you might need a lot of time to discuss the answers to this quiz.
Are you familiar with the “iNat or iNot” presentation? That takes a similar approach to training newcomers.
I think never is too strong a word here. Casual observations without dates are allowed, and can have personal value to the observer. Maybe it’s a lifer species they photographed on vacation decades ago.
Maybe go with: “The date is as important to science as the location and evidence.” or something along those lines?
The date one is the only one I can see being controversial. As in, if it’s an old picture and you have no clue when you took it, it’s arguably better to leave the date blank than to make something up.
If I take photographs of 4 different plant species in the same location, they should be four different observations. I believe that there are divergent opinions on what to do if they’re the same species.
iNat guidelines are clear that one organism + one observer = one observation, so several individuals of the same species should not be lumped together as one observation.
Some people are of the opinion that that guideline is bad and they deliberately go against it, but if I were teaching new users how to use iNat, I’d go with what the official guideline is, which isn’t ambiguous in this case.
agreed - one label per observation - I usually look for a note from the person posting to see if they are pointing or naming the item they are wanting to identify.
The question about the bee on a flower becomes difficult when it is a honey bee. I live near a beehive that is under the care of a beekeeper. Most honey bees in my garden probably come from that hive (or one of several human installed and managed hives further away but still with flying range.) However, I also live in an area where some honey bees have established hives independent of humans. So should I mark the bee on the flower as “cultivated” because the odds are that it is from a human managed hive? Or leave it as wild because it might be from a completely wild hive and it flew into my garden on its own?
Honeybees are generally treated as “wild” on iNat unless the observation shows a managed hive – that is, they are assumed to be potentially wild unless there is evidence to the contrary.
Statistically, the vast majority of honeybee observations on iNat almost certainly represent individuals from managed hives. But because domestic honeybees are by intention free-ranging and individual workers look pretty much identical to workers from non-managed colonies, the consensus seems to be that they should be given the benefit of the doubt. This is a somewhat arbitrary but pragmatic approach.
At least here in Europe, I imagine most researchers simply omit honeybee observations from their data sets regardless of whether they are marked as captive or wild; non-systematically collected iNat data about probably-but-not-verifiably-domestic honeybees not likely to be useful for anything but an extremely small set of research questions. Around here honeybees make up around 10% of bee observations, so even if there were a way to distinguish domestic and wild/feral individuals, it would probably not be a particularly good use of anyone’s time to go through them marking them all as not wild.
I imagine anyone using iNat data on cats in places where domestic cats are frequently allowed to roam outdoors will have to engage in similar considerations about how to assess the data when it is often not going to be possible to definitively determine whether any given individual is wild or not. This is one place where iNat’s wild/captive distinction fails to work – not because there aren’t relevant differences between wild individuals and domestic but free-ranging ones, but because iNat records don’t and quite often can’t provide enough context to determine this.
Well, there is considerable ambiguity here, which hinges on the meaning of ‘section’. My interpretation was that section referred to the species and of course there is no requirement to name a species. Not a fair question!
Also, what the hell is ‘Option 1’ for observations on private land? Another obscure question!
