Please Help Annotate Project Observations
As many of you are probably aware, the iNaturalist developers have rolled out several platform updates recently, including a new format for observation pages, some new features on the updated taxon pages, and also an observation feature called annotations. This tool takes a select few of the most used observation fields & standardizes them, which provides an opportunity to enrich iNaturalist data in a way that can be used for features such as the Life Stage trend graph on taxon pages for those taxa that have a Life Stage annotation option (which I have found especially interesting for some insects. With regard to this project, the annotation tool provides an opportunity to define, in a standardized & searchable manner, the life stage for insect observations. As the goal of this project is specifically related to insect life stage, I see this as an opportunity to improve our project data, and would like to move toward having all project observations annotated as life stage = larva. If we are able to do this retroactively for all current project observations, I can add a project parameter stating that observations must be marked as such in order to be included in the project. This will help us to collect additional new observations, and will also enrich the dataset & improve the life stage trend graphs for the project taxa.
How will we do this? Unfortunately, there is not yet a batch tool to annotate multiple records at once. However, there are some keyboard shortcuts available in the Identify tool that make it fairly quick to annotate records. While there are over 20,000 observations in our project, I hope that, with our 100+ members, we will have enough person-power to get all these observations annotated without any single person having to do a vast amount of work.
We need your help adding annotations to project observations.
It's easy, and you get to look at lots of cool caterpillar photos!
To add annotations to project observations, start with this link to the Identify tool, filtered to only include observations that have been added to the project but have not yet been annotated with life stage. Click the thumbnail to open the first observation, select the Annotations tab, then add the annotation Life Stage = Larva. You can do this quickly with keyboard shortcuts: simply type "ll" [for L(ife Stage) L(arva)], then use the right arrow key to move on to the next observation. If you just want to see those from a specific state or area, you can filter them further by adding something to the "Place" box. If you happen to find an observation that doesn't belong in the project (e.g., an adult butterfly or moth, or a sawfly larva masquerading as a caterpillar), please annotate it appropriately, and then send me a message so that I can remove it from the project.
Special thanks to @bouteloua for suggesting crowd-sourcing this process using the Identify tool, and thank you to everyone who has participated in the project. Stay tuned for a post in the next few months with some analysis of our project data.
