It is coherent if simplification of reality is considered acceptable and keeping people in a limb below full knowledge is a good compromise. With this I just hope not to be addressed as a gatekeeper anymore in the future…
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Their knowledge is not restricted, nothing stops them from learning, and it’s not a simplification it’s making it work for ordinary people, if in the future there’ll be way to distinguish Taraxacum by clear features it’d implemented in ids on all observations I question, now no scientist has an answer and far from everyone agrees that division is needed at all.
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I set up an iNat project in my work area to assist in documenting the biodiversity of the region and to help with our conservation efforts.
Despite the fact that we don’t get a lot of IDs (not being in one of the major iNat using regions) and that there are often mistakes (a not insignificant number of them mine), as a scientist out in the field working at the intersection of conservation, research, and politics I’m extremely grateful for iNat, the users, and the folks who help with IDs.
In our region there was almost no data on arthropod diversity and now we have a lot of info on it, far from complete, but our count has jumped from maybe 200-300 species to over 1000 species , with many, many more that haven’t been identified to species, and there are a lot more here to find. We’ve been able to add a bunch of birds and reptiles to the list that were previously undocumented in the area. Same with plants as well as bats.
iNat has been a big help on the documentation side and that then provides us with excellent information to leverage into the conservation and politics side of the conservation work.
So there are sometimes mistakes, especially with unfamiliar or tricky genera. So what, that just highlights opportunities where learning and resources can be applied, as well as potential research opportunities in some cases.
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@Italopithecus, So are you saying that a potential solution is to prevent everyone from giving an ID below section? Or for a warning flag to pop up if someone attempts to give an ID below section? Thinking about what specific solutions might address the problem can help to more clearly visualize, in everyone’s minds, if a manageable solution exists.
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@Italopithecus, what defines “extremely critical”? Who would make the decision of which taxa fit the definition to have the warning notification applied?
In general, critical taxa are those large or small group of species which taxonomy/identification is extremely complicated due to the presence of small or almost indistinct morphological differences. In this light all (or nearly all) genera in which agamospermy is widespread are critical but there is not just this case. Indeed also sexual taxa can be extremely critical. Unfortunately, for many reasons, in certain cases the identification of these taxa has often followed deeply rooted clichés. Leaving dandelions behind, just to make few examples we are familiar with here, wild roses are often almost all addressed in certain non-scientific contexts as Rosa canina, annual weedy Stellaria as S. media, Alchemilla as either A. vulgaris or A. alpina. There are surely many more examples in floras of other places and, especially, among animals and fungi.
Realizing that some users often or almost always fall in these clichés, one can argue that there must be specific reasons behind this phenomenon.
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i would really hope no one would be doing detailed taxonomy work on so called Taraxacum ‘microspecies’ based on inaturalist data such as school kids taking photos of a dandelion and tagging it as officinale. I personally question the value of such microclassification at all aside from evolution and small scale ecology research, but that is off topic. I would hope any expert doing research on a cryptic species would understand that iNat isn’t going to somehow have correct IDs when they literally can not be ascertained without a microscope and sometimes genetic analysis.
The way I think about iNaturalist is as a really thick, big, awesome field notebook. Anyone who has done field work knows they sometimes can go back to their old notebooks and scratch their head in confusion as the notes were taken when being bit by bugs, trying to finish a survey before a thunderstorm when it is 90f degrees, etc. This is a big shared field notebook. The data isn’t less valuable for that reason it is just …different. It needs to be processed and used differently than say, herbarium specimens. And that is ok!
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Ah, you mean challenging. By critical, I thought you meant that it was important to get a correct ID (or to not make an incorrect ID). Yes, almost every genus of organism contains species that are challenging (or impossible with photographic evidence alone) to identify. So there would need to be a warning notification for almost every genus. I’m not sure it would be all that helpful if it popped up a warning notification for everything.
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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 challenge” since they cannot be simply identified.
Orobanche spp. in many cases are critical but, despite being often pretty challenging, sometimes can be identified without too many troubles.
Annual Salicornia are critical since there are some taxa that are morphologically undistinguishable.
In the end I would say that “being challenging” is often related to the way an organism is presented; “being critical” is mostly related to taxonomy.
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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
The problem of incorrect IDs is widespread among professional curated collections also. Lack of sufficient expertise across all taxa. I wish there were solutions for both herbaria and iNat…but it’s hard to see what they might be without funding for armies of taxonomists.
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 are. Best are resources that provide for identification of male and vegetative plants as well as the pistillate plants most references identify. Along the west coast, the new (2018) Flora of the Pacific Northwest and the Jepson Manual for California are both good. The relevant Flora of Oregon volume isn’t out yet but will be useful. (Disclaimer; I wrote the keys for FPNW and F Oregon.) For the Rocky Mountains, there’s good material by Dorn available on the internet. Elsewhere? I don’t have the experience to say.
The Flora of North America key has much going for it, but it sometimes mixed information about the different Salix life stages because the FNA editors wouldn’t allow the more correct three separate keys format.
I’d be happy to talk with you separately about Salix ID, if you want. You can contact me through CarexWorkingGroup.com.
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Actually, you can identify vegetative (non-flowering) Salix with mature leaves, if you have a good reference for your local area.
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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 external help it’s very hard.
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Is this what you’re asking for? https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-often-confused-with-warnings/1269
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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 adopted way, in a wide sense for the entire group … generally known as common dandelions …
T. officinale on iNat is in the broad sense, as above …
Is POWO’s definition different from that? Otherwise what would it take to propose a deviation?
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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 slightly different sense from “challenging” as suggested by @pfau_tarleton. However, this usage is not one that is familiar to native English speakers, who are mostly going to interpret “critical” as meaning exceptionally important, or inclined to find fault, or relating to criticism. I’m guessing there may be some usage for “critico” in Italian that expresses your concept exactly; unfortunately, I don’t think that sense exists for “critical” in English.
On the broader point, several users have pointed out that iNat staff have clearly stated that they won’t use any external data to prioritize identifications from some users over others. And so far they haven’t identified any internal metric for ID reliability that would solve more problems than it causes.
One approach that seems to me to have great potential would be to integrate wiki-style community-authored identification guides into the ID process. The type of guides created by @pfau_tarleton and others are great. I just wish they could be dynamically available to users as they consider possible IDs for an observation.
If these guides could be implemented as a dynamic key, then that would add a whole new level of assistance. I’m thinking of something that would be linked to specific taxa (and perhaps also a specific geography). When a user goes to select an ID that’s within the guide’s scope, they’re presented with a button allowing them to launch the “Agalinis in Texas identification guide”. The guide would use an interactive key approach, so users could narrow selections based on just those features they can determine, and there would be some capability to include text and annotated images to help direct the user. That may well be a pipe dream, of course!
In the case of “problem taxa” the key elements in the identification guide could indicate which characters cannot be reliably determined from regular photographs and encourage users to leave IDs at whatever level can be supported.
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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.
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At the risk of setting off a poopstorm: that sounds more like a question of whether you are a lumper or a splitter.
Here we go!
It depends on whether you are a lumper or a splitter.
Lumpers vs. splitters.
Lumpers vs. splitters.
On the contrary, it is central to the topic. As in, it determines whether this is even an issue or a nonissue.
I thought it meant species for which a misidentification would lead to a disaster or mishap of some kind. Which is why I do not see the point of arguing about dandelions. Do the alleged thousand species fill a thousand different ecological niches? Have a thousand different medicinal properties? Make a thousand differently flavored dandelion wines?
Most plant species have multiple synonyms, due to the history of botanists describing and naming something that they did not know was already described and named, or describing every variation of phenotype as a new species, or other reasons. But we do not insist that every described taxon in the synonymy be recognized as a valid species.
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Regardless of the lumping vs splitting issue (whether you want genus > section > microspecies or just genus > species, where species = section), there is also the issue of misidentification. At the moment all introduced dandelions in North America are identified are either T. officinale (= section Taraxacum) or T. erythrospermum (= section Erythrosperma).
According the the paper discussed in the other thread, just in BC there are 7 introduced sections in the genus. So observations there are being forced into one of 2 species when they could actually be one of 7 sections/species.
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