Collating resources for difficult taxa?

This post is inspired by the journal entry Documenting Mushrooms · iNaturalist, which @nikibifrost often links in comments on mushrooms. It is a guide to what to include in a photograph to make a mushroom observation identifiable.

Well, mushrooms are not the only taxa with problems. Think of that one genus or higher that you know well, that you are constantly bumping back from species-level identifications. Wouldn’t it be nice if more of the people observing it knew how to take an identifiable photo?

Take Lumbricidae. People seem to default to calling them all Lumbricus terrestris, and taxon experts are seldom able to do more than bump them back to family. Now, maybe getting to species takes dissection or microscopy; but what about genus or some other level between family and species? Are there features which, if people knew to include them, would let you get to one of those levels?

We can’t currently search journal posts the way we can search Forum posts, so I had to wait to start this thread until I came upon an observation with Niki’s link to the journal post. But maybe this thread can be a start on collating some of this type of material if it is out there. Have you come across journal posts that explain how to take identifiable photos of taxa that are usually unidentifiable?

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