In many posts I’ve seen statement like 1 observation = 1 individual. The help pages do not support this stance.
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000169927-what-is-an-observation- = individual
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000169931-can-i-identify-multiple-taxa-per-observation-what-if-my-photo-has-a-flower-and-a-cool-bug- = taxon
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000169941-what-are-tags-observation-fields-and-annotations- = taxon
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000218339-is-it-ok-to-make-multiple-observations-of-the-same-species- = species
Individual, taxon and species are not the same.
This is further confounded here
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000171680-what-do-i-do-if-the-observation-has-multiple-photos-depicting-different-species- = Please do not vote “No” to the “Evidence related to a single subject” DQA condition in these scenarios … When there are different individuals of the same species in separate photos (e.g. photo 1 shows a female adult lion and photo 2 shows an adult male lion and photo 3 shows a lion cub).
I saw that the report for Master’s Final Project that iNaturalist grew from did not have annotations or define what an observation was.
I’ve been annotating Australian bird species and would suggest the “Life Stage” and “Sex” fields be combined and changed to multiselect as per the “Evidence of Presence“.
There is an existing thread somewhere on the forum with recommendations for annotation additions or changes…. You could also submit this as a feature request.
I don’t see anything in this link
that says whether an observation is for an individual or a species. It just answers a question about making multiple observations of the same species.
In the case of
this is a deliberate inconsistency/concession to the fact that some users do (incorrectly) make observations of individuals of the same species together where the same individual is not present in all photos or where it can be more or less impossible to be sure (eg, a flock of birds). This approach was introduced along with the single subject DQA to prevent lots of otherwise correct observations from becoming casual grade. It’s a reasonable, pragmatic compromise in my opinion.
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I’m not seeing “observation” defined differently in these links…
This says it’s okay to add multiple observations of one species at the same place and time, which implies that an “observation” is not defined as an encounter with a bunch of individuals of the same species. Each observation should be of an individual, rather than one observation being for multiple individuals of the same species.
The only place the word “taxon” appears on this page is to say that you can enter the name of a taxon in the observation field for Eating- i.e. if your organism is eating a cricket, you can enter “cricket” for what it’s eating. There’s nothing about how many organisms an observation includes.
This is the only page that matters here, as it’s the one that defines what an observation is, and it explicitly defines it as being of one organism.
This page is saying you can’t observe multiple taxa in the same observation. Which is true, because each observation is of one individual, so it must be of one taxon. Saying “each observation is limited to one taxon” does not imply that “each observation can be of as many individuals of that taxon as you like”.
So I see one page that say an observation is one organism, one page that works under that assumption, one page with nothing to say about the matter, and one page that I could see someone reading out of context and getting confused. But definitely nowhere do the help pages say or imply “multiple organisms of the same taxon should be combined into one observation”. The closest it comes is in your final link, where it basically says “sigh people keep doing this wrong, but if they at least got the same species in all the pics, it’s not a big enough deal to send the obs to Casual”.
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This DQA is intended for a very limited purpose, to mark observations where the subjects of the different photos are clearly different species. In other words, when one photos is a tree, the next a small flower, the next a beetles, the next a bird, etc. The wording is misleading, though. Something like “All photos show same subject” or “. . . same species” might be less confusing. We have to correct this a lot and I always feel the problem isn’t with the person who conscientiously clicked this in the wrong context, but with the wording.
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Each photo shows a different subject
?
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