Are there any accepted practices for how to mark a suspected hybrid besides simply identifying it to genus? I believe species in this genus have been noted to hybridize, but the specific combination I am looking at has not been documented formally. The simplest option seems to be to identify the specimen to genus and then to use the “Possible hybrid” observation field, but I would like to know what the best option is so that other users could find such observations later.
I have seen two other threads which discuss some options, but it is unclear if there was any consensus.
I’ve used “PresumedParent1” and “PresumedParent2” observation fields for unnamed hybrids. They’re definitely not perfect since both fields have to be searched using the URL to find observations with a specific parent. It also only really works when it’s reasonably clear what the parents are- with some taxa one or more parents may be less obvious. Otherwise it works ok and could be good to use in conjunction with the “Possible hybrid” observation field (or others).
I also try to make it a habit of entering into the observation description (or comments, if its someone else’s observation) that it’s a putative hybrid and what the parents are suspected to be. That way I or others can use the search function to look for the word “hybrid” within that genus. Unfortunately including the putative parent in the search term results in observations ID’d as the parent species, not just observations with that name in the description/comments.
For genera that have multiple/numerous unnamed hybrids and named hybrids, I’ve also used projects like this one to group them all together (and to also include named hybrids). I like it as a way to group all the observations together for comparison/reference, and it additionally has the utility of further documentation, references, and outreach via the journal.
Again, none of these methods are perfect, so if there are better options out there I’d be excited to hear about them!
I would like to add to what ciafre wrote: the observation field can also be filled with “Natural Hybrid”, which opens a field where you can enter a comment, e. g. the parents or something like “parent 1 x second parent unknown” - or also “parents unknown”.
I also created a project (for the genus Tillandsia) to catch all natural hybrids of a genus - which turned out to be 3 projects: one for all nothotaxa of the species, one for presumed hybrids that are not nothotaxa (where observations can get added to manually) and an umbrella project to combine both. Not sure this was the best way to do it, though.