Isn’t it possible anymore to use only the year as the observation date? I know this used to work before and the “AI” still thinks it does when doing a search, to quote it exactly:
“To specify just the year for an observation on
iNaturalist, you can update the date information to only include the year (e.g., “2024”) and leave the month and day blank. […] When only the year is provided, iNaturalist treats the observation date as approximate, which is acceptable for historical data or when exact dates are unknown."
However when I tried today to modify a date via the website, it did not allow me to specify anything else but a full date.
Was this an intended functional change? I see why having a full exact date is important, however, for very old observations it could still be useful to only specify the year when the exact date is unknown instead of no date at all, which makes the observation Casual.
But iNat is intended for biodiversity we (ourselves) see, so the oldest date is 100 years ago - bit optimistic … If the obs is seasonal, then a month would be useful.
My example was not to suggest that we use that particular information about the dodo as an iNat observation, but rather to suggest that if someone has evidence of occurrence of an organism, but not an exact date, it would still be useful information.
Not anymore I am afraid, but I had some old observations from 2005/2006 which I had initially created as 01/01/2005 and then edited to remove the day/month and it worked, just as suggested here: “To specify just the year for an observation on
iNaturalist, you can update the date information to only include the year”. In the meantime I have found backups of the original photos which contained the original date/time and I have re-created those observations with an accurate date, which is best of course.
But today I found some casual observations with missing date and only an year mentioned in the comment so I recommended the owner to add just the year instead of no date at all, but that didn’t work.
So no, I don’t have proof, but I know I used that “feature” myself in the past… or maybe I just found a bug which was fixed in the meantime
Is evidence of an occurrence of an organism useful, in a general sense, if it only has a year connected with it.
Provided that the above is true, should iNat accept such observations with imprecise dates.
Regarding the latter, I am undecided. There may be good reasons not to allow that.
As for the former, we can consider as an example, a photo of a fish that one caught in a particular Adirondack lake during a vacation in the summer of let’s say 1964. Yeah yeah yeah, there was a particular Beatles song played often on the radio in the boat that year. That information about the year would be useful in that it documents an aspect of the historic biodiversity of a possibly acidifying lake, especially if that species of fish has not been recorded there since that year.
Sorry, I think you previously encountered a date bug and that the AI answer is incorrect - to my knowledge year-only dates haven’t been accepted in my history of using iNat.
I do not have any examples at hand, but I recall I ran into several observations in the past that only showed a year as date… I always wondered how they did it, as i was never able to leave an observation just at year
That information about the year would be useful in that it documents an aspect of the historic biodiversity of a possibly acidifying lake, especially if that species of fish has not been recorded there since that year.