Maybe a big factor in this is that some of the trees observed are in a big urban center which means:
- Captive/Casual Grade: There seems to be less interest in identifying these since iNat is biased towards wild/native plants, see topic: Relevance of cultivated species observations so they often get treated more like an ignore pile by some identifiers.
- Non-Native: Local plant identifiers tend to be better at identifying local, native flora. Most commercial, decorative plants come from far away places that identifiers may not be familiar with so it could just be lack of knowledge about the plant.
- Non-Interactive: Trees are really tall so it’s hard to get up close and touch/observe the flowers, fruit, leaves, branches etc. for a good photo. This leaves dry/dead leaves, which are harder to identify with or just not enough detail to be confident in the ID. Like most plants, if you can get flowers and fruit in the observation, it increases odds of others identifying. I think fewer people are willing to ID without these features.
I definitely appreciate the local, regular identifiers in my area, but especially those who also look at captive/cultivated observations, since the second point makes identifying them harder.
On the upside, commercial non-natives tend to be repetative, there are maybe 20-30 such popular species in an area, so once those are learned (by looking at captives in the area) it’s easy enough to identify them.
Edit: Added third point