Reviewing Detections

BirdNet-Behavior classifies every clip automatically, but you are the final arbiter. The detection-review queue lets you record a verdict — confirmed or rejected — on individual detections, building a clean, human-checked record over time.

Reviews vs. quarantine

These are two different quality-control surfaces; it helps to keep them straight:

A rejected review flags a likely misidentification for your own records — it does not remove the detection. Quarantine is the tool for keeping a dubious record out of the log entirely.

The triage queue (/detection-reviews)

The queue lists recent detections that have no verdict yet, newest first, each with its species, time, and confidence. Two buttons record a verdict:

• ✓ Confirm — the identification looks right.
• ✗ Reject — likely a misidentification.

A running tally at the top shows how many detections you have confirmed, rejected, and have left to review. Recorded verdicts move to the Recent verdicts list, where an Undo button clears a verdict and returns the detection to the queue. Re-reviewing a detection simply replaces its previous verdict — there is never more than one verdict per (date, time, species).

Reviewing from a detection

You don’t have to work the queue to leave a verdict. Every detection-detail page carries a Review this detection widget with the same Confirm / Reject buttons and a badge showing the current verdict, so you can judge a clip the moment you’re looking at it — spectrogram, audio and all.

Comments: why, not just what

A verdict says what the station decided. Six months later the question is why — and “call length says Downy, but the spectrogram is Hairy” is the sentence that makes a record defensible to somebody who was not there.

Under the review widget, every detection-detail page carries a Comments thread. Write a note, it appears with your username and the time, and it stays that way: a comment is never edited. The database refuses it — there is a trigger on the table that aborts any attempt to rewrite a comment’s text, author or timestamp — so what you read is what was written.

Two things follow from that, and both are deliberate:

• Many comments per detection. Two observers disagreeing is the point. This is the difference from the review widget’s own notes field, which is keyed on the detection and replaces whatever was there: a second reviewer’s note silently erased the first one’s reasoning, and neither of them was named.
• A comment can be withdrawn, not rewritten. Remove deletes it outright — which is what a note containing a typo, or a neighbour’s name, needs. The audit log records the removal, its author and its id, and never the text: a comment deleted because of what it said must not survive in the log that recorded its deletion.

Comments are up to 2 000 characters, and writing one needs an admin sign-in — the same gate as confirming or rejecting. Anyone who can see the detection can read the thread.

Scripts can join in through the API: GET, POST and POST …/delete on /api/v2/detections/comments (see the API reference). Those comments are attributed to api rather than to a name the caller supplies — a bearer token is not a person, and a name the caller chose is not attribution. A script with something to say about who is speaking says it in the comment.

Sharing a detection for a second opinion

Not sure about a call? Both the detection-detail page and every row in the quarantine queue have a Share button that copies a public /r/<token> link. The share page resolves quarantined rows too, so you can send a rare bird that hasn’t been admitted to the log to another birder for a second opinion before you decide.