15. Pros and cons of low-level identifications reviewed=any, quality_grade=casual

https://www.inaturalist.org/subscriptions?type=observation

I enjoy doing "Unknown" identifications (it's like a treasure hunt!). Sometimes there's a "lump" in the queue of a particular user's bulk uploads that aren't labeled yet, and I'd like to skip over them because the person may be working on them themselves later. Is there a string I can include in the search url to omit their observations for the moment?

Starter url example: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?iconic_taxa=unknown
Example url when you are positively filtering for a user: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?iconic_taxa=unknown&user_id=questagame

e.g. if you want to ID observations in DC but not from me (user ID 7580), you'd use https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?verifiable=true&page=1&place_id=5&not_user_id=7580

There are a few ways to find someone's user ID, but the one I go to is to the header search, type their name, and then click on their profile from that and you'll see their user number in the url instead of their username. e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/search?q=carrieseltzer

--
LowLevel identifications:
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#coarse-ids
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/inaturalist/uwtZP7VOHcA
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/17474847

The

lrank, hrank, and rank are great tools

if you need to find observations at a specific rank. You can also use the Identify page to find your own observations that you haven't yet reviewed, regardless of whether others have IDed them (I also have a ton to go through myself).

able to filter with
iconic_taxa=unknownso they can see all their unidentified observations
/observations?lrank=phylum&place_id=any
It's verifiable=false, though, so:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_id=reiner&verifiable=false

They can always use the Rank filter in the Explore Filters menu to
see, for example, all observations ID to taxa of rank Phlum or coarser
like this:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?lrank=phylum&place_id=any

?Iconic = False is a very easy filter and gives a realistic picture of what needs to be identified.
?lrank=phylum is a mix of rubbish that has been rejected as identifiable with good data that require attention.

Smiley face

You can currently find them through the Identify page UI if you change to reviewed=any, sort by your username, and change the quality grade:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?reviewed=any&quality_grade=casual&user_id=reiner

For southern Africa:
None of our plant experts (professional taxonomists) are willing to work above the level of family (and many stick to tribes). Identification above level of family is purely useless - no one is prepared to look at them. (exceptions are Mosses, Ferns and Gymnosperms, where experts tend to work above the family level)
Competent users willing to make IDs to family and tribe level (and these are rare) are happy to target the unidentified observations, but they are not enthusiastic to tackle the Phylum, and even above class level. Even the dicot and monocot level is not used. Identifications in these categories tend to get stuck there and are never visited. The complication of having all the dross hiding the good data is an issue.
A few get noticed by people working on local sites, but they would be identified no matter what their ID rank at the time.

I'll continue adding coarse IDs as needed as I personally find it helpful and many others have said the same. I frequently search to add IDs of plants, so having at least the coarse ID is necessary for that. Obviously finer IDs are better if possible (insect instead of animal), so if you can slightly finetune whatever your proces

reason to do coarse IDs is to make sure things are tagged to the point where experts can find them

[b]The lrank, hrank, and rank are great tools if you need to find observations at a specific rank. You can also use the Identify page to find your own observations that you haven't yet reviewed, regardless of whether others have IDed them (I also have a ton to go through myself).[/b]

If there are observations that really can't be IDed beyond "plant" because the photo is really really bad or something, then please mark it as no longer needing community ID.

https://www.inaturalist.org/subscriptions?type=observation

https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/15450-announcing-changes-to-projects-on-inaturalist
https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/ahospers/45530-66-relaties-tussen-organismes-aangeven-door-add-test-interactions

test=interactions

66. Interactions, Relaties, Verbondheid

more details here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-interactions-to-species-pages/433/16 here are many ways. Have a look at
https://www.inaturalist.org/search?q=interactions&source%5B%5D=projects

Now a lot depends on your philosophy.

For instance you can just add an interaction (one of the many fields): and name the other side of the interaction.
But that assumes that you know the other organism, and that if you have it wrong you will fix it, and that if the name changes taxonomically, then you will fix it.

see https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/specific-animal-plant-interactions

My philosophy is that you put both as observations and then link them: that way the community takes care of the identifications, and the link will remain no matter what.
If you follow my philosophy look at:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/interactions-s-afr

How can we get this higher up the “desired” list of features?
Both the New Zealanders and southern Africans have projects dealing with this.
Ours is visible at https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/interactions-s-afr 4

Basically, we record only the active interaction (i.e. “a eats b”, not “b is eaten by a” - the latter just being the reciprocal of the first), although user pressure has resulted in us adding a passive field for the reciprocal observation, given that observations fields link only one way, so that these observations do not display their hosts) as:

Visiting flowers: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?field:Visiting%20a%20flower%20of:%20(Interaction) 6
Eating: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?field:Eating:%20(Interaction) 5
Parasitizing: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?field:Parasitizing:%20(Interaction) 1
Attached to: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?field:attached%20to:%20(Interaction)
Carrying: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?field:Carrying:%20(Interaction) 1
Associated with: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?field:Associated%20with:%20(Interaction)
& the passive
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?field:Passive%20Partner%20to:%20(Interaction)

Note that in each case the field value is the url of the interacting observation. Unfortunately we cannot use this is a query to summarize the interactions.
We can ask
“What flowers does the Cape Sugarbird Visit?” - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=113055&subview=grid&taxon_id=13442&field:Visiting%20a%20flower%20of:%20(Interaction)= 3
but we will only see the bird, and not the flowers, even though all the urls to the flowers are in the field - see: https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/7459 2.

In over 5 years of using this “set” of interactions, we have never had a request to add additional interactions (e.g. Eating = preys on = killing to eat - i.e. “killing for fun” has not cropped up), although it would be nice to have a hierarchical dictionary of interactions (e.g. visiting a flower > pollinating a flower (> for nectar, pollen, oil, gum)/robbing a flower/, etc

I’m happy to leave the test=interactions thing available, I’m just not going to make it visible by default or integrate it into the UI. I don’t think we need to ice this topic, as I think the title sums up what we want pretty well. Personally, I think the Feature Requests category is a way to gauge what kinds of things people are interested in, and not necessarily specific implementation plans, so it’s valuable to me to know how many people chose to upvote this. In fact, I will spend one of my votes on it right now

plant Lantana camara apparently “visits flowers of” 46 species of insects, rather than the other way around https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/50333-Lantana-camara?test=interactions 13). Is it a functionality you can leave available, or are there reasons not to do so?

We investigated this when we redesigned the taxon page in 2016 (yikes, that was a while ago). I just made it so you can see what we did by appending test=interactions to any taxon page URL, and I’ll use examples to explain why we didn’t develop this any further.

The big problem looming over this whole feature is that observation fields are a bad way to model interactions. Since they represent a totally uncontrolled vocabulary, they’re rife with synonymous fields, so it’s hard interpret situations where, for example, there are both eats and preys on interactions, e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/117520-Enhydra-lutris-nereis?test=interactions 28. What’s the difference? Why are both supported?

Another problem is that using observation fields to model interactions means that one of the two taxa in the interaction is not subject to crowdsourced identification, so anyone can say that oaks eat humans and there’s nothing the community can do to correct that. As an example, here’s a butterfly that supposedly eats itself: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/51097-Papilio-zelicaon?test=interactions 16. It doesn’t, this is just due to an erroneously added observation field. Site curators could just delete this field, but that’s generally not how we like to perform quality control at iNat.

On top of that, we really wanted to incorporate data from GLoBI 12, since we like them and we think it’s cool that they incorporate iNat interaction data, but mapping taxonomies and field semantics proved a hassle, and again it presents the problem of data that the iNat community can’t correct if they find errors.

What we’d like to do is to make a new feature for interactions where an interaction is a relationship between two observations with clear and controlled semantics (to the extent that that’s possible). So instead adding an obs field that says an obs of an oak represents that oak eating a human, you would create an interaction and have to choose two observations, one of an oak and another of a human, and choose “eating” from a menu of interaction types where “eating” means “taxon A is putting all or part of taxon B inside its body for the purpose of personal metabolism” or something. Other users could then vote on whether that was the correct interaction type, and the two observations could be independently identified. We could try and pre-populate this new kind of data with observation fields, or at least make a tool that helps people review their own interaction obs fields to make new-style interactions out of them. That’s a lot more work, though, and it hasn’t really been a priority, so we haven’t gotten around to it.

Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that I agree this would be cool, but doing it right will take considerable effo

Posted on 19 de outubro de 2018, 02:06 PM by ahospers ahospers

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