Not sure if bug or not. On the Annotation section for mushrooms, the only choice that comes up automatically is Evidence of Presence and the only thing in the dropdown is Gall. I know I can add more appropriate annotations, but this seems strange.
Platform Website
Browser, Safari
**URLs https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/133611888
Screenshots of what you are seeing See below
Description of problem While in “Identify”, Look at annotation page for mushrooms
The annotation ‘Gall’ is applicable to anything in Kingdom fungi. It would be difficult to restrict the term within the kingdom due to the large numbers of different kinds of fungi that can cause galling, and even some mushrooms can cause galling of a host.
I assume ‘Gall’, as an annotation within the category of ‘evidence of presence’, is meant to indicate the observation relates to a symptom, without the causal fungal organism necessarily visible. That’s important, although I think ‘symptom’ might be a better general term.
Here is the complete list of annotations and the groups to which they are applicable. What other annotations for fungi do you think are missing?
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/annotationvalues
Thank you for that link. I have bookmarked it.
If the observation is of a mushroom, under the first iteration of Evidence of Presence I would expect to be able to choose “organism.”
But, I think I might not be explaining this very well. Recently we had a forum post that provided a task for iNatters that were not very experienced at identification. The task was to go through existing observations and on the Annotations tab, choose annotations such as Alive or Dead, Evidence of Presence, Male or Female, etc. I guess I expected to see more choices on that tab for mushrooms.
To have “gall” as the only choice for any annotation for mushrooms on the Annotations tab seemed lacking to me, but I know very little about fungi, so maybe more is not needed.
I can’t think of any additions to ‘symptom’ for clarifying Evidence of Presence in fungi.
There are some other annotations for fungi I can think of, and that I use in other recording databases, and that would better as annotations rather than buried in observation flags. They don’t apply to mushrooms, and adding these annotations is not a task for the inexperienced. They are probably worth documenting here for future reference though.
Anamorph, Teleomorph, Holomorph - to distinguish between asexual, sexual and both asexual/sexual stages present.
The standard annotation for rust spore stages: 0 (spermatia), I (aecia), II (uredinia), III (telia), IV (basidiospores).
Perhaps the identification qualifiers cf., aff., and sensu lato/sensu stricto (in those cases where species complexes are not recognized and/or species remain undescribed.).
Thank you. That’s all way over my head. :) I’ll stick to birds.
