As written before, there are groups of taxa that are practically impossible to be identified with photos. This is mainly because we cannot expect that users would collect a sample a make photos at the microscope or because some genera are so complicated to require a specialist for their identification.
One simple solution would be to automatically warn users that the proposed id is likely wrong and that it should be taken just as a suggestion. Alternatively, another possibility could be to keep the cv from identifying at the species level but to limit the id to the genus level or to a higher rank depending on the complexity of the subject.
I do not see anything bad in warning users that what they photographed is something complex. On the other hand, we have many beginnners who are convinced to have photographed a certain taxon while it is not so.
I agree that knocking a lot of observations back to genus level is tedious, but I think I’d be wary of doing it in bulk fashion, for several reasons. (1) I’ve encountered a few “Sphagnum squarrosum” that look awfully good even though in the “wrong” place. I’d prefer to leave those as is, with a comment that they appear to be way out of range. We may learn something. (2) I keep an eye out for observers who are way better botanists than I am and may be right where I’m wrong. The bulk approach would miss them. (3) “Corrections” generate replies. By doing just a few each day, I’m not flooded with comments and questions (or criticisms) the next day, but get enough that I can handle them. I guess I feel each observation at least deserves a look. But thanks for your creative ideas.
Sorry, I forget that “annotation” has another meaning here. In the herbarium world, if I add an identification to a specimen, that’s an annotation.
You exactly just described a taxon split. This is something curators can do. It’s mostly used for changing scientific names but can also be used to correct out of range ID’s in cases where there are many 100’s or 1000’s where IDing all of them is too much work.
But it’s done only if taxons didn’t exist before, e.g. S. magellanicum was split and new species were added, but there was no split done, so we had to reid them manually and there’re still wrong ids on the site (I don’t check them as people get aggressive when you reid their observations even with links to data).
Accommodating new species is the usual purpose of a taxon split, but that is not the only context in which it can be done. Hence my statement earlier that I think you can use a taxon split to do this, but I don’t think it’s a great solution… we shouldn’t be narrowly restricted by the intended purpose of a tool, but seeing that a tool can be used for a new purpose doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do so…
Sphagnums, like other mosses, seem to have pretty wide and diffuse ranges, and are also hard to identify and thus often underdocumented, so i think this would be a hard one to knock out by range alone.
Maybe it has been discussed before, but are casual observations used to train the AI? I know of at least one plant species which seems to have zero observations in its native range, but is so popular in cultivation that there are many pages of casual, cultivated specimens. I also notice that almost all were IDed only to genus. If I move enough of them to species, will the AI start suggesting that, even though they are casual?
I believe there still must be the minimum of 50 Research Grade and 100 Verifiable, or whatever it is, to allow the species to be included in the training set. However, for the actual training, photos are randomly selected from all observations of that taxon, including Casual ones.
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