Expansion of Project Area & Project Name Change
As of this morning, Caterpillars of the Eastern US is now Caterpillars of Eastern North America. I have expanded the project parameters to include Canada's eastern provinces, which is more in line with my original intent (see discussion here). I will also be adding eastern Mexico sometime in the next few weeks.
We will need to work through the backlog of past observations for these provinces as we originally did for each of the project states, and I propose that we work at it in the same way, with people volunteering to work through all observations of Lepidoptera for individual provinces. To aid in this process, I will create and post below links to Identify pages, filtered for each province. If you claim a province, please post a comment stating your intention, review all Lepidoptera observations, and add to the project (as well as adding the "life stage = larva" annotation) any which feature a caterpillar. For tent caterpillars & webworms, please only add those observations in which at least one caterpillar can be clearly made out as an individual & at a scale at which it is potentially identifiable (at least to genus); for bagworms, please only include observations in which the caterpillar is outside, or visible protruding from, the pupal case. More discussion on these finer points here, starting on the fourth comment down.
Welcome to the project, Canada! We look forward to meeting your caterpillars.
Comments
Here are the Identify links - please post in the comments if you'd like to claim a province. This process should be relatively quick & easy compared to what we went through for the US, given the significantly smaller numbers of observations involved.
Manitoba - kylejones (complete)
Ontario (this will be the biggest task, having ~24,000 observations of Lepidoptera)
Quebec - eraskin (complete)
New Brunswick - jtuttle (complete)
Nova Scotia - kylejones (complete)
Newfoundland & Labrador - jtuttle (complete, reviewed by kylejones)
Prince Edward Island - eraskin (complete)
Nunavut (no caterpillars in evidence, but here's the link for future reference)
Note that portions of Manitoba & Nunavut are west of the 100th meridian - I will try to avoid adding observations from these areas, and will periodically check & remove any that sneak through (not to be longitude-ist, but we have to have some kind of standard).
Newfoundland & Labrador "done", although someone may have beat me to it since there were no caterpillars. I previously reviewed a lot of southern Canada because of the boundary issue with "Eastern U.S.", so it will take me some figuring out how to backup and redo those provinces.
Nova Scotia is done.
I did the few that were in Newfoundland & Labrador. I also did about 10 pages into Nova Scotia (before completed by Kyle) and about 10 pages into Ontario -- just exploring. I'll work on New Brunswick, since that hasn't been claimed, though I'm not sure how quickly I'll get to it.
Thank you both for the quick work!
By the way, I'm wondering if you plan to set up an automatic "add" for Lepidoptera observations with the Larva life stage (because I don't know how viable it is, for me at least, to keep searching areas and adding observations to the project indefinitely). It's a lot easier and faster to page through observations adding Larva than it is to add observations to the project. And I think a lot of people may now be adding Larva on their own.
I realize an automatic "add" would add some observations that shouldn't be in the project, but it might be a lot easier to periodically survey and remove those than it would be to keep adding manually. (As an aside, a number of weeks ago I used the "Find Unsuitable Observations" tool to review and then remove a bunch of observations from the project, e.g., observations that started out as Lepidoptera and were eventually identified as Sawflies or other -- the tool worked well!)
Another idea is that it would be nice to have a way to add observations to a project via the pop-up window in the Identify tool. Or even better, a keyboard code like there is for Life Stage.
I also coded a few to Life Stage = pupae that were already in the project. Since I declined "curator" status I can't remove them from the project, but maybe @eraskin or @jtuttle can search for life stage=pupae and remove?
I agree that life stage = larvae autoadd for lepidoptera would be great.
Yes, my hope is to eventually move towards an auto-add for Lepidoptera observed in the project area & with Life Stage = larva. My intention was to do that after we manage to go back through and add that annotation to all (appropriate) observations already in the project. I was hoping for a big push to add the annotations, with many hands making light work, but it doesn't seem to have really caught on (although I've certainly had some good help on it). It actually looks like it's not yet possible to add project rules based on annotations - that's a feature that I guess we'll need to ask about.
I agree that it would be great to be able to add observations to projects directly from the Identify dialogue. @jtuttle, if you'd like to post something about that on the iNaturalist forum, I'd be glad to chime in, but I hate to always be the one bugging them about something.
@kylejones, I'll see if I can locate those pupa observations & remove them.
Thank you both for all your help.
Pupae removed, except for a few cases in which at least one photo appeared to include a larva. Did I miss any that should be removed, based on these criteria? http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?quality_grade=any&project_id=caterpillars-of-eastern-north-america&term_id=1&term_value_id=4
Interesting. Can you fix erroneous labeling? It looks to me like those are all larvae, or larvae plus pupae.
I stole Manitoba. You can have Ontario Quebec and New Brunswick :)
Forgot to look for obs west of the 100th. I'll go back and remove those (if I put them in).
It looks like you can "disagree," but not sure you can suggest an alternate Life Stage, once someone has suggested one. This seems like a flaw in the system.
Have fun with Manitoba - I was just going to suggest that someone else would be welcome to work on it. I'm very busy with field work this month, and probably wouldn't have been able to get to it for a while anyway. I can work up a quick way to find any erroneously added west of 100 degrees, if that would be helpful.
Quick way to find observations in the project that are west of the 100th meridian: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=caterpillars-of-eastern-north-america&verifiable=any&nelat=65&nelng=-100&swlat=10&swlng=-130
(I haven't removed them yet, in case anyone wants to try it out).
Manitoba is done, cleaned up west of the 100th. Nice tool.
Maybe we can just contact the person who entered the erroneous life stage. I'll try that and see if it helps.
I noticed one I marked as pupa is back/or I missed it when I was checking http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/6709940
Hi,
When I encountered an observation labeled as pupa when it was really a larva, I voted it down and commented to the observer about it. Don't know if it ever got changed, but agree that's an option to try. I also thought it was a flaw in the new annotation system.
I'd be glad to post about getting an Add Project option in the pop-up window, or for that matter, a Batch Add Life Stage option (i.e., the "Batch" would be all observations in this project) or Batch Add to Project option, but I'm not sure I can get to it very soon -- also will be in the field and swamped for a while. I'm hopeful about the Add Project option in the pop-up window but skeptical about any Batch options, as I've read a couple posts implying that these are difficult to create or not likely to be created (if my memory is correct).
Evan, is there a Quick Reference for the URL codes that you use to create custom searches? I need to get up to speed on those...
@kylejones, thanks for taking care of Manitoba. I could probably split Ontario into some kind of sections like we did with Texas, if it seems like too much for one person to take on (or even just to have some intermediate end points). I removed that pupa you mentioned - not sure how it snuck back in.
@jtuttle, I started a thread about batch annotation tools, but it didn't seem to get much traction, which is why I went for the crowdsourced approach. The number of non-annotated project observations has been slowly dropping, so someone is clearly working on them, just not the 50 somebodys that would make it trivial. If you would suggest an Add to Project option for the Identify pop-out window when you get a chance, that would be great (and I think plenty of other people would appreciate that capability, too).
I don't know of any quick reference for the URL snippets - I've mostly learned them from forum discussions and just doing various searches & seeing what shows up in the URL. However, I know that there are some that can be used but aren't options in any search. Perhaps we should suggest some sort of reference or wiki to building custom search URLs. I'll look around and see if something of the sort already exists.
I just noticed that any URLs we have saved with the original project name are now not working properly. I had a few pull-down bookmarks to aid in searching that I had to change, and some of the searches built into the earlier threads have the same issue.
I had the same problem, but it's an easy fix. In the URLs, replace "caterpillars-of-the-eastern-us" with "caterpillars-of-eastern-north-america"
I suggested that they allow annotation-based rules for projects, and sounds like it will take some time but they're going to work on it. This would put us a step closed to being able to auto-add observations that meet the project parameters. I'll just need to more precisely define the project area.
New Brunswick is complete.
Great! I'm thinking I'll break Ontario up into a few pieces to make it more manageable, but I haven't gotten around to it yet...
Sounds good.
Okay, I haven't gotten around to dividing up Ontario yet (LOTS of counties, and been really busy), but I HAVE just added most of eastern Mexico to the project (all the states that are entirely or almost entirely east of the 100th meridian - will deal with the partial states later).
I also posted a request for the ability to add observations to projects directly from the Identify tool - if you want to voice your support for this request, add a message here. I'm going to see if we get any traction with this before I post links for all the states, in hopes of making the process easier on us.
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