I wonder if there is a rationale for not including “song” as an available evidence of presence for bird observations. I will often hear birds without seeing them, and considering that the mobile app allows for the recording of sounds, it just seems like a conspicuous oversight.
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I always annotate a observation with a bird’s song as ‘Organism’, because we are just hearing the organism instead of seeing it.
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Sound is already a media option, so an additional evidence of presence might be redundant. If you are wanting to differentiate song, call, etc., observation fields are better.
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I’ve wondered this too, but as said above, observation fields are probably best for this. Most observations are visual in nature by way of being photographic evidence, so having song as an evidence field wouldn’t be verifiable by other identifiers the same way “organism” or “bone” would be.
Well, I am specifically talking about observations with audio. My feeling is that I am not providing a photo of the organism in question, but I am offering a recording as evidence of its presence nonetheless.
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For me, I am pretty rusty on birdsongs. I will, more often than not, be providing a recording, leaving it as simply Birds (Class Aves) and relying on other experts to chime in on species. It just seems to me that, without a photograph of the organism in question, a recording acts as evidence of said organism’s presence.
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You can already search for sounds vs. photos.
Evidence of presence is specifically for what is in the photos.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/new-annotation-evidence-of-presence/23945
Adding sound as evidence of presence would be redundant from searching for media type, unless you were annotating the different kinds of sounds.
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I understand what you’re saying. It was hard for me to understand the absence at first. I’ve always left the evidence section blank for sound-only observation. The presence of a sound file in and of itself acts as evidence of presence to me since we can search for it. Using observation fields prevents redundancy and allows you to be more specific about what type of call is being heard, if you’re able.
There was a discussion of this a couple years ago here, that might be of interest:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-evidence-of-presence-annotation-for-audio/40854
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@warrenlayberry FYI, I changed the link after you read this, to an earlier discussion.
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I agree! Sound waves coming from an organism are just as much evidence of that organism as light waves. Humans are such a visual species we tend to think of seeing something as more certain than hearing it, but when I hear an crow I’m witnessing it just as directly as if i see it, and am just as sure of what it is. If iNat had the technology to record and replay the smell of flowering jasmine, I’d consider that direct evidence of the organism as well.
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You can also annotate it as alive… dead birds don’t sing
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Yes, well, I certainly agree that it’s evidence—that is more or less the point of my post—but I can see what other folks are saying as well though I’m not entirely sure I’m convinced. To my mind, redundant or not, on a platform where virtually all observations are, in fact, observed and photographed, marking a recording down as evidence of presence makes at least some sort of sense. Nothing saying you could not make it down as organism and song.
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This raises the interesting question: Is there any organism, other than humans, that makes an identifiable sound while the organism is not present? I can set an alarm clock and when you hear it go off many hours later, you can tell a human has been there. Is there another organism you can ID by sound the way we can ID a deer by its tracks, scat, bones, etc? If not then I’d argue just having the sound file is the same as stating that the organism was directly observed via sound.
An “obsevation” does not strictly mean “seen with your eyes” on iNat. An observation records your interaction with nature and hearing (bird song, frog croak, chipping chipmunks, woodpecker drumming) is very much an interaction with nature.
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Sure, I get that, but what comprises 99.9% of recorded observations on the site are photographs. I have all sorts of interactions with nature every day that don’t get recorded precisely because I don’t have my camera with me and/or my phone isn’t up to the task.
Anyway, it’s truly not a big deal. I mean, if adding birdsong to the list of evidence of presence (for birds) is somehow a bridge too far, so be it, I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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I’m still not sure I understand what the benefit of this feature would be. If you’re already on the observation page you can already tell if the observation has sound, a photo, or both. The only other use of annotations I know of is filtering, but as has been mentioned you can already filter to observations with sound.
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Congratulations; you just came up with the title for a country song.
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I agree that audio files are evidence of presence of the organism itself, exactly the way a photo of the organism would be. I can’t think of any organisms besides humans that have constructions that make sound when the organism is not present.
I have wondered whether it would be useful to have some kind of standardized way of classifying types of vocalization for observations with audio (song, flight call, alarm call etc. and maybe also percussive noises such as tapping or thrumming or clattering), similar to what other more audio-focused websites such as xeno-canto use. This would probably be a bit beyond the purpose of annotations, since calls are mostly not directly phenology related (though some vocalizations may be connected with phenology-related behaviors such as mating or migration), but perhaps observation fields might work (here we again run into the problem of searchability and visibility because people have to know about observation fields in order to use them).
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3 posts were split to a new topic: Can’t post sounds as observations?