16. EXIF tags with an "=" "count=5"
The current Batch Edit tool, while clunky, will do this. Edit a batch,
click "Batch operations," choose the "count" field, and apply the
value.
If you use http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/upload, iNat will
also add observation fields from EXIF tags with an "=" in them, so if
you add tags to your photos like "count=5" that will also work
(incidentally it should also work for taxa, e.g. eating=Homo sapiens
for a photo of an organism eating a human).
o one could possibly use the "User Comment" Exif Tag and add something like
count=5, Insect Nectar Plant=Eriogonum fasciculatum, Elevation=3000 uld like to be able to upload a csv file where the Count field could be included in a record. I use a program for data collection which includes a count field, so it is currently a lot of work to upload a large number of records and then manually wade through them all adding a count to those with > 1 in that count fiel
Further to my first request, I notice that the GPS Accuracy, while it is a standard data entry value for iNaturalist via the App or geotagged photo upload, is not supported in CSV upload. Similarly, Annotations are not supported and are a manual entry only. These seem like significant oversights to me and I would request that all of the standard observation fields be included in the base import csv format. In addition, I have found, through an anonymous tipster, that the csv upload format can be "customized" via a "hidden" process by first creating a Project and specifying custom Fields in the Project, which will then generate a custom template which will include the specified Fields. However, it would seem to be much more flexible and universal if the CSV header row was simply used as the template by default and this feature was documented. While field data entry using the App is fun and useful for occasional observations where a data connection is readily available, it is far too cumbersome and battery and data intensive for serious field data collection where a dat connection is available and extremely tedious and punishing when no data connection is available.
An intelligent alternative which would satisfy all such issues in a flexible, conventional and well defined way would be to support JSON format which would support better serious data entry options than the current App can provide.
iNaturalist is evolving nicely and has now become a very useful system to share all of my most significant natural history observations with photos. I am looking forward to the time when it will be feasible to upload all of my significant observations without photos and my more casual, but still valuable observations with or without photo
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