I am defining several forest plots that I intend to track closely over the next year. These are small approximately 10 foot x 10 foot areas of my larger forest that I intend to inventory monthly. One is a particular forest seep dominated by poison ivy, another a dry area of hemlock-spruce forest, etc.
I expect to generate a few dozen observations each month for each plot. I’d like to link all the observations for a given plot together - so I could later look at all the species found in the poison ivy seep, for example.
How can I best link these together? Is there a tag or something you’d recommend I use?
Creating a project for each plot feels excessive. I already have a project for my property as a whole.
If it’s just my observations, and geospatial data wasn’t going to be fine enough to use the map to indicate each area of interest, I’d probably use a tag. You can then easily find the related observations by clicking it:
I don’t think it’s excessive to create small places and easily track anything within them (though you’d need to set observations’ circle within boundaries of those places.
This feature request addresses your question. If you’re working with square plots then the method in this comment is likely the easiest way at present to go about what you’d like to do.
EDIT: a 10 x 10 plot is going to be smaller than the error margin on most consumer GPS units, especially those built into phones and cameras. Any system that relies on a boundary to select the observations may wind up giving poor results readings with plots that small.
Tags put me on the right track. I’m going to use Observation Fields though, because I can define a list of them and select from a dropdown, which eliminates the typo risk on tags.
I do plots like this for work and sometimes have put them in inat and tracked them with tags or fields. I don’t have anything super consistent as I don’t consistently add them. But if you want to talk about any other methodology stuff you can @ me here or on iNat.
