Caterpillars of Eastern North America is now a collector project!
The iNaturalist team recently released updates allowing projects to use annotation-based rules. As such, I have converted the caterpillar project to a collector. This means that all observations of Lepidoptera in the project area (North America east of the 100th meridian) that are annotated Life Stage = Larva will be added to the project automatically. This will relieve the burden on our project curators somewhat, as observations no longer have to be manually added to the project one at a time (although making sure caterpillar observations are annotated appropriately will still take some work). Thanks to @tiwane and the other developers for making this happen!
Thanks also to @bouteloua, @kimberlietx, @coatlicue, and everyone else who helped with the big push last year to get all of our project observations annotated when the annotations feature was added. This put us in a good position to take advantage of the new collector project rules without having to do lots of catch-up work.
Also, kudos to @christine123 for topping 1,000 caterpillar observations (more than twice as many as anyone else!), @kchiasson for having observations of the most caterpillar species (nearly 200!), and @k8thegr8 & @ericwilliams for being the top caterpillar-identifiers.
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Good news. Thanks.
Unfortunately after converting to a collector project, there is no longer a page navigation box that used to appear when scrolling down through the observations. Currently, when I view a list of observations sorted by submission date, it starts with today but ends at Oct. 3, 2018, with no way to continue on. The only way to view all the observations is to choose “Search” instead of “List” or “Grid” since the page navigation box will appear then. (Thanks to @cmcheatle for this workaround tip when the same thing happened with Caterpillars of Ontario.)
@barbara_taylor, thanks for passing on that knowledge. I'm afraid there may be a few other growing pains as we adjust to the new system, but hopefully nothing too major.
Nice! This makes it much easier to help now, by zipping through observations that need annotation using filters available in the identify tool. E.g., I just did a few annotations by filtering for Lepidoptera, Louisiana, Without Annotation (Any), and both Needs ID and Research Grade.
I do like that the process is automatic. It is important however to remember to post the observation, go back into edit the observation, and then add annotation of larvae otherwise the observation is not added. In the upload screen the option of annotations is not available so the extra process of going back to annotate needs to happen.
Absolutely. I (and perhaps a few others) regularly scan through all the Lepidoptera observations for different regions of the project area adding annotations to all the caterpillars, but the more we can encourage people to annotate their own observations, the better. I will continue to advocate for an option to add annotations at the upload page, which will make this more seamless.
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