SVL and Developmental stage
@truthseqr, I see you adding both comments and fields for SVL (Snout-to-Vent-Length) and a field for Developmental stage for the juvenile newts. Thanks for adding these - shall we all start doing that ourselves when uploading? I can add it to the How To document if it's to be standard practice.
I do set the Life Stage Annotation to Juvenile when appropriate. What is the benefit of having both Life Stage and Developmental Stage set? I've wondered this too about the several other fields that seems duplicative, like "Roadkill: yes" and "Found Dead: Roadkill". I imagine that it's caused by the system having lots of flexibility, so people just make up new fields etc to suit them and their projects instead of using existing ones, and we've covering bases so people can find relevant observations. But it also seems messy and inefficient and can easily pile up.
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Hi @newtpatrol, yes, it would be very helpful if you could add SVL values for the juveniles you find. Also, if you see I've made a mistake in measuring existing ones, please feel free to fix them. In a lot of cases, it's a best guess.
Yes, there's a lot of duplication and overlap of fields. Originally I used fields to add metadata to my own observations for consistency. Unfortunately, these aren't searchable fields, and the only way you can use them in data analysis is to export the data. Also, some projects (like California Roadkill) require certain fields.
Some folks (like @merav) are consistently using helpful Observation fields. I wanted to make certain fields required, but there was a lot of pushback early last year as the team was getting up to speed.
For juveniles, I need the word "juvenile" in a searchable field (Text or Tags). I've recently started adding SVL for those observations people have identified as juveniles. I haven't decided whether to add this field for adults yet. Probably not.
The "Midpen Biodiversity Index" project requires the following Observation fields, which I thought appropriate for our purposes:
Number of Individuals
Developmental Phase (egg, neonate, juvenile, subadult, adult)
Health Rating (healthy, diseased, injured, dead)
Note: "Life Stage" field was created by someone else.
The "California State Roadkill" project used to require the following fields, but no longer does:
How was this detected? (found remains)
Road speed limit (25mph)
Road type (Urban-major, multi-lane)
Identification confidence
Dead on road (DOR)? Yes
The "Chileno Valley Newt Brigade (2019-2020" project uses the following fields, which I thought were appropriate for our project as well:
Alive (AOR), Dead (DOR), or Injured (IOR):
I also wanted to capture the fact that these animals were victims of roadkill. There are a lot of duplicate & overlapping fields out there (e.g., Cause of death, Found dead, and Roadkill). You can use any of these, or better yet, just use the word "roadkill" in the Text or Tags fields.
Collecting data on juveniles will allow us to better understand the population dynamics of the Lexington newts. Here's a new project that's all about the juveniles and how their deaths disproportionately affect the total population:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/pacific-newts-dead-juveniles-lexington-reservoir
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