I thought it would be interesting to see what we’ve been annotating - especially in light of the recent annotation updates. So, I took the top 50 most-observed research-grade (non-fern, non-conifer) plant species in the U.S.A., and looked up what percentage of observations for each species had “Flowers and Fruits” annotations.
Hopefully, this will inspire us to further annotate some of these species. Personally, when I’m learning to ID a new species, I especially appreciate the annotated observations!
In addition to certain species getting special attention from a few users, I’m sure how obvious the standard physical characteristics of any given species are impacts our desire to annotate. Still, It’s kind of interesting that, for example, we’ll happily annotate American Beautyberry (23%), but Eastern Redbud (8%) can take a hike. Anyway, the full details are in the table below. Enjoy!
Interesting. It would be neat to know what aspects are most commonly annotated, too. I’m more likely to annotate something that’s a bit unusual, so if most of the observations are in flower (ex. roses), then I make sure to annotate the one I see in fruit.
American Beautyberry has kind of generic leaves and so it’s probably rarely posted without flowers or it’s distinctive fruit, and vegetative shrubs rarely identified if they are posted. The flowers of Eastern Redbud are conspicuous, of course, but the leaves are unusual, different from the rest of the plants in its habitat, and therefore it stands out and therefore it gets posted and correctly identified even when vegetative. Relevant? I think so. I hypothesize that people are more likely to annotate a plant when it has flowers or fruit than when it doesn’t.
Really, though, questions about what captivates people are fascinating - It’d be cool, for example, to be able to figure out the median number of photos submitted per observation for each species. I reckon some species get many more photos than others - and not because folks are uncertain regarding what’s necessary to ID, or some other factor, but simply because folks like the species.
Other identifiers and I try to get people to post lots of photos of each grass, sedge, willow, and other groups because those species are hard to ID and we need details. Of course, most people don’t post lots, so that’s one reason we have problems.
Did you run an API query to get this data, comradejon? I can’t see a way to filter for attributes on the Explore page. Looking at a taxon page (e.g. for one of my favorites, Partridgeberry) I can see the Flowers and Fruits attributes as subgraphs on the Seasonality graph, but I can’t get a convenient total.
I try to conscientiously add these attributes when I’m confirming Partridgeberry IDs, because persistent fruits are one of the notable features of this species. This time of year, we sometimes get photos with the trifecta: buds, flowers, and last year’s fruit all in the same photo!
Hey @larry216! I enjoy ID’ing Partridgeberry, and I’ve noticed you’re very good about annotating it - much appreciated!
No, I don’t really have any experience with API queries - and you’re right there’s no obvious way to filter on the Explore page.
But - messing around on the Identify page I figured out that filtering for “Flowers and Fruits” adds “&term_id=12” to the query. So then I went back to the Explore page and added it to my query on that page. Like this:
Then I just typed everything I wanted into a spreadsheet and went from there.
Have fun poking around! It’s not a top-50 most-observed U.S.A. plant species, so it’s not on my list, but following the link above you’ll see that some folks have done an excellent job of annotating, for example, Common Pawpaw. It’s the most-annotated plant species in the U.S.A., and with almost 98% of observations annotated, its graph looks pretty cool!
