Observation field: Evidence type
Kind of evidence of organism presence observed. Please suggest more options in the comments!
kueda
Observations specifying this field
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Could include gall. Can you think of a more generlized way to express this phenomenon that would include other parasite-induced features like galls, bot fly lesions, etc.? Or is it worth keeping such things separate?
It might be worth keeping it separate since it gives more detailed categories.
Alright, I added "gall" if you want to use it.
Thanks! I'll use it.
what about feathers? Here is an example observation https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/35500991
what about shells? https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/21736182
I would classify feathers as "partial remains." Shell would kind of fit in that too, though if it did merit an additional value here it would have to be well-defined. Does that include egg shells? What about arthropod exuvia?
For shells & exuvia, partial remains sort of works, though another term might be better. Hard remains? Cover bones, shells & exuvia. Or how else to state ir? Partial implies not whole, but also not specific. Bone/shell/exuvia imply durable traces that may suggest presence at some point in past, possibly nearby but may have been moved (by collector/predator/weather/water). So has different implications for the observation than the other terms.
I have used "carcass" as a sort of cover-all term to include any remains when they were not easy to classify. That may not be too accurate in my part though.
here is a definition from BODC (British Oceanographic Data Centre) for 'shell'
http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/S12/current/S1239/
i have a few observation photos of beaver lodges - should there be new vocab terms for 'homes' such as lodges or burrows that are separate from nests? example https://inaturalist.ca/observations/10684050
I think I'm just going to start adding things people request and stop worrying about semantics. That's what annotations are for. Curators, feel free to edit this field as you see fit.
@kueda, here are my thoughts:
(1) The "Skulls & Bones" project is one example of folks who specifically want bones, not partial remains or bones with tissues attached. I would vote for a separate category for bones.
(2) Likewise, the "Found Feathers" project is only interested in bird feathers, not bones, not other animal remains. Also, if feathers are categorized as "partial remains", that suggests to me the bird was dead, which isn't necessarily the case, if the bird was just molting.
(3) The "partial remains" category could then be for multiple tissue types (e.g., bones, hair, skin, internal organs, etc.)
(4) Since you allow multiple entries for this Annotation, one could add several categories, as applicable, e.g., bones, feather
(5) Would you like to add "smelled organism" to include skunk/fox scent? (see the values for the "How was this detected?" field.
(6) Would it be possible to map the "How was this detected?" field to the "Evidence Type" annotation, similar to how the "Observation field: Alive (AOR), Dead (DOR), or Injured (IOR)" observation field maps into the "Alive or Dead" annotation? If that can be done automatically, hundreds or thousands of current observations could have an auto-updated "Evidence Type" annotation.
Thanks for creating this new annotation. It will be very helpful.
@truthseqr, there's an extensive conversation about Evidence of Presence at https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/new-annotation-evidence-of-presence/23945, so I encourage you to add your thoughts there. We can map certain observation field values to annotations, presuming there is a good semantic match (e.g. "scat" matches exactly, but "Found remains" is ambiguous).
How about galls?