Description of need:
It is sometimes helpful to see what the seasonality / seasonal plant phenology is of a garden plant. However, there’s seemingly no way to do this currently, as the seasonality charts exclude all “casual” observations.
Feature request details:
Add an option in the seasonality graph’s settings cog to include captive observations in the graphs. (Maybe they could be represented as a dotted line or something? Or the combined captive + non-captive count could be a dotted line above the solid non-captive line?)
Cultivated plants are not always garden plants. They can be indoors, or in a greenhouse, with heating and lighting, and then the seasonality of these plants is meaningless.
I’ve thought about this too. I think the application is so niche that iNat staff will probably never do it; someone with some skills could make an external tool to display that though. I’ve actually done the same thing with garden plants within areas of the Southeast.
Wild plants can also be indoors or in a greenhouse though. You can also have wild plants in odd microclimates that can throw off your charts as well. No datasets are ever going to “perfect”.
For something like ginkgos, because they’re used in landscaping only, they are automatically marked by iNaturalist as a casual observation (even though every now and then we get one that germinated in the wild).
If I wanted to see a chart for what time of the year ginkgos fruit in my county, there’s no simple way I can do that. I just want the verifiable=any url parameter to be read by the seasonality chart.
This would be incredibly beneficial to tracking urban tree phenology. You can argue about whether a kentucky coffee tree is native or not, but when I’m trying to figure out the correct time to be observing for pollinators, the local phenology record would be incredibly helpful.
I just Annotated the heck out of the non-casual and casual kentucky coffee trees in Midwest and Eastern North America and was frustrated that it did nothing to budge the phenology tracker because most of the flowering observations were on urban trees.
I created iNat Explorer, a site to explore iNat data. One of the features of the site is to generate charts similar to iNat taxa page charts that will work with various search queries and filters. The site also has an animated maps to view a series of maps for selected time periods.
Here’s a chart that shows the leaves annotations for Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) in the United States with verifiable=any. There are no flowering and fruit annotations for Ginkgo biloba
To specifically look at Flowers annotation, here’s an animated map that shows Kentucky Coffeetree observations with Flowers annotation from chase-prairie. Click the play button to start the animation.
one thing I want to note is “captive” observations get lesser identifiers attention and so relatively more of them may inturn be at wrong IDs in addition to obvious environment differences that can already affects on true species phenology as said above.
