Caterpillars of Eastern North America's Journal

Annotations streamline adding observations to project

Now that we are a collector project, we no longer have to painstakingly add caterpillar observations to the project one at a time. However, they still need to be annotated Life Stage = Larva in order for the project to pull them in, and ensuring that observations of larval Lepidoptera are annotated appropriately still represents a significant effort. For example, I personally review all Lepidoptera observations from 12 US states and 129 Texas counties, and I have a hard time keeping up. A few other intrepid volunteers review similarly large chunks of the project area (or have in the past). I would like to maintain good coverage to maximize the completeness of the project, but would also like to share the effort among more people so that no one feels burdened by the number of observations awaiting their review.

We need your help!

To make this happen, we would love to have people volunteer to take on the review of Lepidoptera observations for a state or province in the project area (or any group or subset thereof - a tri-state area, a single county, you name it). If you are interested, please leave a comment below naming the area you'd like to be responsible for & I will create a custom search URL for you to use. It's fun & easy, and is a great opportunity to learn about the Lepidoptera in a particular area.

How it works

You can use whatever process you want for adding annotations, but I'll briefly summarize the way I do it as one option.

Every few days or few weeks (depending on the time of year & volume of observations in target place), visit custom link to your filtered Identify page.

For any observation on the first page of results that appears to be a caterpillar, click photo to open observation in the Identify viewer (clicking the taxon name below the picture will fully open, which is unnecessary), click the Annotations tab (or hold Shift and hit the right arrow key twice), select Life Stage = Larva (or hit the L key twice), then close (or hit Esc). If there are multiple caterpillars in a row or if you prefer to scroll through the large images of each observation, click the right arrow or use the right arrow key to advance through observations

Once all caterpillars on a page are annotated, I hit the Mark All as Reviewed button, wait for the number of observations reviewed (upper right) to change, then refresh the page to view the next 30 observations. This way I never have to remember which observations I have already looked at, but you may wish to use a different process at this step

It would be great if there were a way to select multiple observations and annotate them in batch, but for now this is the most efficient process I have come up with. I'll be interested to hear if other people have different suggestions.