Where I come down on it is pretty simple - iNat rules as they are written say each observation must be for one and only one individual. Not for a taxa, not for a number of them you saw in close proximity, but one individual.
And that this definition is silly and should be changed.
So who on staff draws the black bean of rewriting that tiny portion of the user guidelines and suffering the slings and arrows which will follow? ;-)
Before someone tells me iNaturalist is not used to do abundance data, please understand, in no way should collecting of abundance data be mandatory for recording iNat observations, however, it should be standardized for those who wish to.
I’ll give you my own example. I made this as one observation because cardinals usually mate for life. It seems logical to me that a mated pair should be one observation. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/28575721
Granted, I am not interested in iNat for it’s research data ability. But my layman thought seems like the fact this is a mated pair should be important to any data.
iNat is my nature journal. For example for plants, I find it interesting to see how individuals are developing/growing, or, in my urban locale, being managed over time. So I might observe the same individual weed in a sidewalk crack multiple times. : )
This points to something I don’t understand with iNat. My opinion it makes more sense to have one observation(from the same location) and just continue to add photos, dates etc. Then you can view the one observation and see all of the changes.
When my observations are all from the same location, I just don’t see anything wrong with adding additional photos and info. Now if it is a different location, then that is another matter.
Each outing is a different event. I don’t try to cram everything on one page in my journal or datasheet.
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