Hello,
I’ve made a similar post to this albeit for Madagascar, but I’ve also been interested in the flora of Kruger National Park and I was wondering if you know of any good botanists in South Africa I can who regularly take ID requests.
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In my experience, there are quite a few very experienced South African botanists who already donate a lot of time to identifying plants in the region. iNaturalist has a bunch of features already built in to allow identifiers to find your observations and allow you to find potential identifiers.
From what I can tell, I don’t think you have uploaded any observations from either Madagascar or Kruger National Park in South Africa. I would suggest that you upload a bunch of observations, make your own best-guess IDs and give it a few days to see which people find these and add their own IDs. In the meantime, you can always try to research a few of them (e.g. compare against a list of flora for the park, find online guides to particular plant families).
If you have observations that don’t attract identifiers and you’d really like to find a better ID you can try to see which iNat users are the top identifiers for a family or genus within the region, country, park, etc. It’s fine to tag individuals (e.g. @rupertclayton) and politely ask them for help. Be aware that both professional botanists and interested amateurs are under no obligation to assist (but they often will). It’s bad practice to tag people in bulk and it’s probably counterproductive as well. But most people intuitively know what level of effort is a reasonable ask.
Good luck!
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Your obs and IDs are in Florida? So you plan to upload archived pictures? Or a future holiday?
South Africa is ‘well resourced’. If your pictures provide field marks (and it seems they do) you should get IDs.
Meanwhile you can join Mission Impossible and help us where you can to ID the African plant backlog?
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have you joined? https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/kruger-national-park
see here for active botanical identifiers:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&project_id=kruger-national-park&subview=map&verifiable=any&view=identifiers&iconic_taxa=Plantae
troos - best with trees, but generalist
sedgesrock - cyperaceae and monocot expert
alanhorstmann bulbs and everything
wynand_uys all rounder
drmckenzie - generalist
robertarcher397 trees
simon_attwood - generalist
mr_fab - peas
all are active, so no need to call them. you should get an ID within a week or two. But dont upload during the active field season, so from October expect delays.
Here is the current plant checklist
https://www.inaturalist.org/check_lists/155531-Kruger-Check-List?iconic_taxon=47126
(careful though: this tool is deprecated, so is not the very latest, and we have not yet loaded an official plant checklist into the place - you are probably best with the project above, but you cannot easily download a species list from it).
for using the identotron or the compare tool, use the place " Kruger National Park (https://www.inaturalist.org/places/kruger) or place_id=69020
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Thanks for the help, I’m from the US and the reason I’m asking about this is because I’ve been planning to do species lists for natural documentaries that includes the plants shown on screen
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