Categorizing plant and leaf damage?

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Good afternoon!

This is my first foray into the forums here, but I’ve noticed a fair amount of insect identification photos exclusively have holey eaten leaves with no verifiable insect present. The Japanese Beetle is a great example to use for this. I’m familiar with these beetles since they also infest my yard, but I’m not sure about what to mark these listings as to clear some of the last stragglers in the category.

Is there a sort of “accepted” format that other people have used for plant and leaf damage?

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The categories I can think of off the top of my head are:

  • leafmines (and barkmines)
  • galls
  • feeding damage
  • fungal (spots, mildew, rust)
  • bacterial, viral (difficult to distinguish from fungi and from each other)

I don’t see an observation field for anything like “plant damage” but there are projects for most of those, if you can discern which category it goes in.

For identifying any of them it’s very helpful to add the “Host Plant ID” observation field or link to an observation for the host plant if you don’t know its ID yet.

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This project is a good one when you don’t know what caused it. Your observation can sit there temporarily until consensus builds on what is it.

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Welcome to the forum!

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