Wouldn’t it be great if there were a centralized location where this information was easily visible? What you described is the exact reason I would like for there to be something resembling an ID wiki on iNat. It wouldn’t just describe how to ID a taxon, but could explain why ID is difficult or impossible for many taxa. You just proved that it’s easily possible to make such an explanation. If this was the first thing one encountered when they clicked on “Red Maple” to learn more about it on iNat, I would think the rate of spurious identifications would be much lower.
I agree. To see an excellent example of using an iNaturalist journal to help users with identifications tips, take a look at the Guide to the Smartweeds (Persicaria) of North America (https://inaturalist.ca/journal/danielatha/116773) provided by Daniel Atha
No, I don’t think a wiki on iNaturalist will do much good. As @botaflo mentions above, it may actually be counterproductive.
(The following paragraph is an over-generalization.)
By-and-large, observers don’t seek out information prior to leading with an ID. My job as an observer on iNaturalist is to provide an initial guess. The quality of that guess heavily influences the fate of the observation. In order to bring an observation to a correct conclusion with a minimum amount of fuss (without mis-IDs), the software needs to actively communicate with the observer at the time of upload. This impedes the observation process, so it’s unlikely the system will be consciously designed this way.
What!? Acer rubrum x Acer saccharum hybrid exists!? HOW???
Freeman’s maple (Acer × freemanii)
I think a better place for sharing ID information would be one of the biggest improvements the site could possibly make (along with improvements to notifications). I think it would be great to have something similar to a collaborative wiki with a discussion section for each taxon. The discussion would be a place where people could ask questions about a taxon or talk through any potential disagreements about what belongs in the guide. The guide would mostly include information for which there is consensus, along with a description of any uncertainty or disagreements affecting a taxon and how it should be IDed.
My understanding is that Wikipedia doesn’t generally want detailed ID guides in the way that would be required for many species, so I don’t think it’s adequate. It also doesn’t provide a place for iNatters to discuss ID considerations and taxonomy with each other, which would surely be required to resolve any disagreements over what belongs in a centralized guide. Journal posts are decentralized (hard to find) and don’t provide good support for photos to my knowledge. Taxon flags are not very visible, and seem to be more of a place for “problems” to be resolved rather than for more open ended discussions about ID or collaborative sharing of information to produce a comprehensive guide. Most ID discussion and tips seem to occur under random observations, but this is obviously decentralized, rarely comprehensive, and not a very good place for lengthier discussions that go beyond the scope of an individual observation to address broader considerations about the taxon itself.
What I am suggesting would be a place for IDers to exchange information with each other so that expert IDers can help newer IDers and expert IDers can also connect and discuss with each other. The goal of the site is to help people learn about and connect with nature, and this seems like it would allow that to happen with a depth that is currently lacking, while also providing more of a sense of community. I think this would be particularly useful for new IDers and reduce the barrier to entry, possibly reducing the shortage of IDers.
I also don’t really understand the objection that it would be too much work to make such guides. Why should it be the case that if it can’t be done for all taxa it’s not worth doing for any taxa? Can’t there just be a space for this, perhaps an additional tab on the taxon page? It could start empty for most taxa and then gradually build up as people add to it. The most well-known and commonly observed/IDed taxa would naturally be the first to get guides/descriptions, while obscure ones would take a long time. That outcome seems perfectly reasonable to me, and not all that different from what happens with IDs themselves (many obscure/difficult taxa don’t have IDers, so observations go a long time without IDs). Even outside of iNat, there exist many taxa without ID keys or field guides, but that doesn’t decrease the value of the guides/keys for those taxa that have them. No one is being compelled to write guides, so if one doesn’t want to use their time that way, there is no extra work for them.
A reorganization of the description page would go a long way to making IDs easier. The first section should be Description. I don’t want to have to wade thru historical naming , etc before I know what it is. This could be a quick fix. It would be even better to have characteristics bulleted instead of imbedded in sentences like the tree example.
Oh that’s a Silver Maple x Red Maple hybrid. Yea Both species form a species complex, both belong to the same section.
I thought you meant a Sugar Maple x Red Maple, that would be unheard of.
Yes, that’s what I meant. According to New Flora of Vermont (2015), that hybrid is known to exist in Vermont. It is also described in Flora Novae Angliae (2011) where it is known from MA, ME, NH, and VT.
See also:
https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/species/acer/rubrum/
https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:56663-1
Can you tell me what “description page” you’re referring to?
Many observers don’t seek out information, but some do, and I think the site design should be catered to the group that does. I’m not suggesting that the wiki be forced on people as they are making their ID, just making it available for any who care to click on the taxon page as they enter an ID. I also think there are a lot of people who don’t want to spend more than a few minutes on an ID, but do at least click on the taxon page to see a few pictures or quickly look at “similar species”. These people would benefit from a wiki.
My job as an observer on iNaturalist is to provide an initial guess.
When you post an observation, you are asking others to donate their time to help you reach the correct ID. I don’t expect observers to do extensive reading to learn how to ID difficult things themselves, but I think it’s reasonable to expect that they at least click on the taxon page if they don’t have prior knowledge and do a quick skim over the basics. If a user-wiki were available, they could rapidly realize “oh, this one looks like a complicated ID, I guess I’ll leave it at genus/family/other” or “oh, I can ID this species with confidence after only 30 seconds of reading based on a reliable diagnostic feature, so I don’t need to guess.” Many people don’t even try to do this because of how difficult it is currently, but might build better habits and learn more if it were made easier and more efficient for them. I would appreciate this both as an IDer and an observer.
No, not everyone would do this, but the whole point of the website is to learn about nature, so it doesn’t make sense not to provide information simply because some won’t bother to read it. Beyond the casual observer, it could help generalist IDers and new IDers. I would have appreciated it very much when I was new to IDing, and might have started IDing sooner if such a resource had existed.
“They” would be us because there’s no money to pay the hundreds of iNat staff members that would be required to write detailed species descriptions.
That’s awesome the hybrid is blurring the boundaries between species! Is it better adapted?
I can see how it would be difficult to distinguish them. Any guide written about them will certainly have to include these hybrids that form a species complex.
Any good ID guide would also include morphologically unique cultivated varieties of plants too (Especially if they are part of the same species complex, at least briefly)! Acer rubra has so many varieties, both wild & cultivated.
Consideration would need to be given to ID features that are or can be visible on photos, not just the standard “guide book” descriptions. In addition, to be useful this would have to describe the range of ID features across the range of the species. This could end up with some very long descriptions.
As for AI, I would assume that some or a lot of AI recognition would be likely to be based on the jizz of the animal (do plants have jizz?). A bit hard to describe in many cases.
I find the Wikipedia section good, and a short summary of the information about a species is helpful. I also find the section on taxonomy very useful. Links to identification guides would be desirable.
Does a plant give a ‘general impression’ of who I am ? Definitely if you are interested in plants.
Imagine a mighty oak … or a cushion of moss — or a bunch of roses.
It’d be nice if members of the community who are knowledgeable in an area could make a “note” on an organism, which includes tips for the identification that anyone else can see. Perhaps they could be confirmed by curators with reference or such. Stuff like “this species can be distinguished from all other species in this family because of the wing colouration” or something.
Regarding identification information on Wikipedia articles (which are what I think people are calling the “Description Page” here, as the Description tab for the species on the website interface automatically imports the relevant Wikipedia article), I’m not sure what the editing guidelines there are for including identification tips, but perhaps a bigger issue as that Wikipedia edits are supposed to be based on “Reliable Sources", a concept that’s defined within Wikipedia to basically exclude anything that hasn’t been formally published. Whereas many great ID tips come from the observations of other naturalists or experts, and don’t appear in such sources (yet). It is possible to add unreferenced tips to Wikipedia articles, but this is against policy and they are likely to be removed eventually.
But do what, exactly? AFAICS, that website is dedicated to North American Arthropods only, and it makes no claims to be comprehensive. Its identification guides are generally very limited in scope, with only a few cited references.
Yes. It’s very hard to argue against this basic point. The only way to make the idea work at all is to either aim fairly low (in order to maximise coverage); or to limit the scope to highly specialised one-off guides that only attempt to deal with a relatively small, localised group of species.
There’s clearly no point in iNaturalist attempting to implement the former (since Wikipedia is already doing that), and its journal posts/comments are sufficient to cover the latter. The major remaining issue is discoverability - which is effectively what the project funded by the Google grant is supposed to deal with. There’s already lots of useful identification material available on iNaturalist, but it’s distributed across the site in a way that can be quite hard for a casual user to discover for themselves.
This probably also explains why the global community of naturalists have so far failed to develop a general solution to this problem. All the required information is out there somewhere (for the currently described species, at least), but most of it is inaccessible to the large majority of people. I suppose this fundamental inequality provides a nice definition of what most expertise truly amounts to: an “expert” is just someone who has access to a better library than you do.
But do what, exactly? AFAICS, that website is dedicated to North American Arthropods only, and it makes no claims to be comprehensive. Its identification guides are generally very limited in scope, with only a few cited references.
And yet every time I want to ID an insect or spider on iNaturalist that is outside my area of expertise, I have to refer to BugGuide. I also know several professional entomologists who still refuse to move from BugGude to iNaturalist (for posting observations and doing ID work) for this reason. BugGuide’s identification guides may often be minimal, but they work. Plus they provide an outlet for experts to share their expertise in a way that isn’t exhausting. Wikipedia is irrelevant to this discussion as it’s an encyclopedia, not a field guide. It’s generally not an appropriate place to post identification tips or guides. You can put a description of the species there, but that’s rarely what people are looking for when doing ID work. What they want is a concise list of the diagnostic characters or even a key. And the problem with relying on iNat comments (via AI) is that comments can’t include images. A wiki would be a simple and effective solution.
This probably also explains why the global community of naturalists have so far failed to develop a general solution to this problem.
I disagree. I think the main reason is that there has never before been a global community of naturalists spanning all disciplines. EOL was maybe the first attempt, but it was a tiny tiny community and is mostly dead now. The community now exists and could create such a resource if given a platform.