The Android App seems to fill in all the observation fields on the project.

Please delete the superfluous ones when you have time on the web version. Hopefully the problem with the droid will be fixed sooner rather than later.
The iPhone behaves well.
However, this project is best suited for use with the web, when you can easily copy-paste the urls of the observation into the relevant interaction fields.

Most observations only have a single interaction in a single field, but our record so far is over 200 interactions for a single plant.

Bradley Allf is a PhD student at North Carolina State University in the USA. He kindly agreed to share with us a project he did for a programming class that you might be interested in.

For this project, he created a food web of all the observations of animal predation or herbivory recorded in the project Interactions (s Afr).
You can see the food web, and a general outline of his process, in the link below.

Bradley says:
"This project was really neat and allowed me to get a sense for what kinds of observations on animal feeding people were making in Southern Africa and recording for your project. This project actually inspired me to start my own iNaturalist project to record animal feeding observations all over the world to (someday) create a sort of hub of feeding ecology and global food web. You can find that project here (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/who-eats-who). "

If you are interested, please check out what Bradley found: https://rpubs.com/brad7280/whoeatswhosafrica

A nice example, how, just by recording interactions, one can contribute to great science!

FAQ

Ask your questions here and we will try and answer them.

Our iSpot interactions are now uploaded onto iNaturalist as a Project.

We hope next year to have them in a module on their own.

Please check the data.

1. are all the old dark side interactions on?
2. do all interactions have an active and a passive link?
3. are the interactions correctly posted.

Please report any issues here.

How can we use this data?
Unfortunately it is not simple, but the philosophy is:
-- select your taxon
-- decide on the type of interaction you are interested in
... do you need a project or an observation field?
-- choose your filters appropriately from the explore menu.

Here are your important variables:
in the project: &project_id=interactions-s-afr
in the field: &field:Visiting%20a%20flower%20of:%20(Interaction)

Note unfortunately, you can only find observations of the species. You cannot find the species that they are interacting with - that is what we need the interactions module for.
More sophisticated filters are possible (e.g. eaten and parasitized by), but not if they involve taxon data from the other size of the interaction.

e.g. observations with any interaction to Beeflies: (use projects)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=grid&verifiable=any&project_id=interactions-s-afr&taxon_id=415424

e.g. observations with Orangebreast Sunbirds visiting flowers: (use fields)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=grid&verifiable=any&taxon_id=145130&field:Visiting%20a%20flower%20of:%20(Interaction)

e.g. observations of passive interactions to Figs (i.e. eaten by, parasitized by, etc.):
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=grid&verifiable=any&taxon_id=50999&field:Passive%20Partner:%20(Interaction)

iNat does not do interactions.

This project is to try and catch interactions in the meantime until a module is developed

There are already some odd systems on iNat to try and do this. But I have not yet found one that meets our needs.

The problem with interactions is that often one does not know either of the observations. And one wants to link an observation with an observation so that it can be checked, and not a species.

So we dont want to put everything on twice (although of course it will be easy to wean out issues in future), so please think about your interactions.
What we will do is post the ACTIVE observation as the Observation and the PASSIVE observation as the link. Symmetrical interactions choose any one - but why dont we choose the bigger one first?

So if your observation does not match the choices for interaction, then you should rather link from the other observation.

Your choices are:
* Visiting a flower of

• Eating
• Parasitizing
• Carrying
• Attached to
• Associated with

Although this project is primarily southern African and designed to be iSpot compatible, it is open to anyone. less ↑