Many taxa or group of taxa are well-known to be extremely critical as far as their identifications is concerned, that is in most cases only skilled naturalists can provide a reliable identification. This means that in the vast majority of cases these taxa are not identifiable on photographic materia…

[image] pfau_tarleton: Ah, you mean challenging. By critical, I thought you meant that it was important to get a correct ID It is good to understand each other at last. Challenging and critical are not properly synonyms in this case. Dandelions are critical while they do not represent “a cha…

New use of the word for me…but I see the distinction. So for fun, I searched the Smithsonian Museum collection for Taraxacum. Here are their accessions. I wonder if a lot of these are misidentified? https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fV8G9CEccm0uMdDoiHfEDASvpOdxHOFDiyp-6RoH5L8/edit?usp=sharing …

I’m (relatively) good at Salix, and I can tell you that (1) Salix are really hard and sometimes can’t be identified, though with good local knowledge you can get most of them in an area and (2) the Salix posted on iNaturalist are very often not identifiable. Good references? Depends on where you a…

[image] marina_gorbunova: and flowers of course as it’s the main needed part Actually, you can identify vegetative (non-flowering) Salix with mature leaves, if you have a good reference for your local area.

If a person is asking how to id them, I doubt leaves would be enough, especially considering how key authors love to describe vegetative parts the way it’s impossible to be sure in anything. And as I remember Salix keys as many other plant keys start straight from flowers and fruits, so without exte…

[image] Italopithecus: Given this, the probability that a certain “common dandelion” is the real T. officinale is very small. By the description given in the flag, the probability is 100% by definition: … the name T. officinale should be used, according to the traditional and generally ado…

Hi @Italopithecus . Are you perhaps trying to say that certain taxa are easily confused or finely separated? Or maybe that they are difficult to distinguish from each other or cannot be reliably distinguished based on typical photographs? I do understand that you’re intending to use “critical” in a …

for what it is worth, when I saw ‘critical’ i thought this was about critically endangered species, perhaps an issue with auto obscure or something of the sort. That is the main place I see ‘critical’ used in ecology, myself.

[image] Italopithecus: the first ones I think of are Taraxacum section Taraxacum, At the risk of setting off a poopstorm: that sounds more like a question of whether you are a lumper or a splitter. [image] upupa-epops: Has POWO’s taxonomy changed since this flag? If not, then from iNatu…

A way to prevent unexperienced users from identifying very critical taxa?

General

upupa-epops December 1, 2020, 11:54pm 38

Is this what you’re asking for? https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-often-confused-with-warnings/1269

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A way to prevent unexperienced users from identifying very critical taxa?

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