Contributing multiple pictures / observations

Any users who are logged in may contribute their pictures to CasaBio. This is a 3-step process, allowing you to add lots of information to your contributions.

The first step of the process is uploading your pictures, and adding information to them. The second step is grouping the pictures together into observations (an observation is a plant or animal at a location at a particular time). The last step is adding information to the observations, including identifying them.


Identifying is simply the process of saying "I am ___ certain that it's ___ species in this picture". For example, you might identify an observation containing 3 pictures of a caterpillar as a monark caterpillar, and you're "very sure".

Each observation keeps track of each user’s provided identifications of it.

For example, User A might say that an observation is “very likely” to be in the genus “Acacia”, while user B might say it is “not likely” to be an acacia.

The user’s individual identifications are aggregated to produce a “community identification”.

In the above example, if the users have a similar reliability score, the observation would get a community identification of taxon “acacia” with a reliability score of approximately 50%.

Users can identify an observation as several different taxa, even at different taxonomic ranks, based on what they think the organism is. These are used to create a community identification for each taxon.

In the above example, User A might also identify the observation as “possibly” the species “Acacia mearnsii”

The community identification with the highest reliability is used to identify that observation. The observation’s name then becomes the taxon’s name.