I study pollinators in the US Pacific northwest. So I have by necessity learned enough taxonomy to name any bee in our collection to genus, and chip away at species. So I am a user of keys, which are often challenging for the non-specialist. Issues:
- Poor coverage for my region – e.g., many DiscoverLife keys exclude western species
- Excessive coverage—e.g., keys that cover many species that would not appear in the PNW.
- Couplet crises—in a dichotomous key, if you fail to properly score an early character – is that one ocellar diameter, or more than one OD?—then you’ll never get the right answer.
- Inadequate insect photos. Occasionally there are really fine specimen images. Often there are dusty crumpled images of pinned bees that don’t display diagnostic features.
- Lack of really clear trait images/drawings.
There are certainly great resources that attack some of these problems. Exotic Bee ID, Jackson’s key to Willamette Valley species, DiscoverLife. But I would like to make my own key, for taxa most relevant to our collection, with local, quality images of characters and exemplars. I want a polyclave key, that lets a user pick which characters to enter in narrowing down ID choices.
I’ve stumbled across a platform for creating a lucid-type interactive key, for free: T he biodiversity collaborative management platform
I’ve used this to make a genus key specifically for the taxa we’ve collected in several years of work in WA and OR. I’ve illustrated it with examples from this collection, and placed links to iNaturalist observations for each genus in OR and WA..
Interactive key for bee genera of the Prairie Pollinator Project.
I’ve made this, and species keys, for our own project. It allows me to efficiently define taxa so that a colleague knows how to make IDs consistent with mine, even if we later revise the classification.
But I am also interested in using this kind of key for citizen science. In iNat, most bee IDs are probably determined by the algorithm and expert input. I am as excited as anyone by the power of this. But my notion is that better diagnostic tools would empower amateurs to learn the traits that define taxa. It would encourage them to make better photos to capture diagnostic details. It would give them a basis for discussion with experts.
I’d love to know what you think. I’ll note a couple of caveats:
Difficult technical keys are of course necessary in many cases. To get to species often requires understanding details and terminology that are beyond typical amateur ability. Any key I make has to be explicit about the limitations. My genus key is good for 99% of bees that we’ve collected in our target habitat. It will show a user what other iNaturalists have seen that fit the ID. But it will miss very rare genera, or common items outside of our study habitat.
The biodiversity collaborative software is very nicely designed, but has limitations. A key one is an apparent lack of any kind of support – many emails sent to the www site are unanswered. So I have a problem that my own troubleshooting cannot resolve. (I have created new descriptors [one is “Using this key”] that don’t appear in the list on the www page – they are only found by searching for them, which would not be obvious to a user).
--David Cappaert
