This has been discussed, but the conclusion is that most people do not understand the disctinction between these types of plants and it’s really difficult to make a simple icon to represent each of them.
Yeah, I suspected that was the case and common names often don’t help at all. It’s hard enough for botany students to figure our why club mosses and spike mosses are not actually mosses, and why running cedar and ground pine are not actually gymnosperms. Throw in some Spanish moss (flowering plant) and Iris moss (algae) and it gets just very confusing very fast.
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if it isn’t already - please make that a feature request. I will vote for it
Sorry, can’t read your whole post right now, just a quick skim. I wanted to let you know that I wasn’t asking you to mark things as casual. I had gotten a notification that you had added an ID of flowering plants to an obs that I had marked as casual previously (it was a photo of an entryway into a garden). So like if there are obs that are already marked as casual you don’t have to ID them for my sake (unless you want to of course).
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Thanks for clarifying. I will continue doing what I was doing.
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I like this idea. This is probably the wrong time for me to start volunteering for it, as I’ve got a pile of uploads to do from my last trip, more summer trips scheduled and the identifying I try to keep under control (UK needs id users newer than 2 weeks) is getting away from me a little bit. But if anyone would like their area’s unknowns poked towards flowering plants / vascular / ferns / moss, or Agaricomycetes / common lichens (though I’m less confident for that), give me a shout, I love monotonous tasks… (that’s not sarcasm)
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If individuals are going to go this route, there should be some degree of thought when making a general identification. I saw a suggestion made yesterday for “flowering plants” that clearly had a snake in the picture. As an identifier, my first inclination would be to believe the submitter intended that observation to be of the snake, not a plant in the photo.
Identifications should also not override previous IDs. If the intent is to clean up all of the “unknown species” and make it easier for others to search them, then identifications should be restricted to those.
That was a mistake I made. It was an Unknown observation, which had a plant in it, and the snake looked like a crack in the surface to me when I first saw it. I changed my ID to the snake as soon as it was pointed out. Not a representative example of the topic here, IMHO.
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Please cite anything on iNaturalist that calls for this.
What is the point of making a suggestion that goes to a higher rank that the original suggestions? Simply because someone doesn’t want to sort through every plant?
That’s also not stated anywhere in iNat.
Adding higher rank than previous ids is not equal to overriding them, nothing really overrides them but disagreement ids.
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Just a note for those new to adding coarse IDs to unknowns: Sometimes there is a “placeholder ID” on an observation. It is in small gray font on top of the page when identifying things in the “unknown” pool. I completely missed these when I started identifying and had some folks get upset that I erased their detailed IDs. It took me a while to figure out they had these placeholders and they were getting erased as soon as I put an ID on their “unknown.” Unlike other IDs, placeholders just disappear. It’s a good idea to check for these and either copy them as a comment with your ID to keep a record of them or just leave those observations alone.
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Sometimes there is a conflict in the identifications already there. If, for example, there are two IDs at species level because two people are identifying different organisms in the photo, then a third person unsure of the exact species may add an identification at a higher level to support the observer’s choice of subject.
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And there is probably a reason for the conflict that would not occur if the submitter had detailed why he/she identified a particular organism in the photo.
When it is not readily apparent why something is being identified over another species, the onus should be on the submitter to specify what species they are trying to identify. If a photo does not make that obvious, then perhaps that photo is poor representation of that species.
I’ve seen this with fungi as well. Instead of stating that they are trying to identify a particular source of damage or growth on a plant, they post a picture of a plant with no description. Then, after multiple IDs make it research grade, the original poster comments that they were interested in what caused spotting on the leaves.
Providing more information at the onset would eliminate alot of these issues.
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Yes, some times as one find this kind of observations
is better to look for any indication of what is the intend of the user (e.g. reading notes or placeholder in comments). Sometimes even the observer gives a weird ID when they had a clear “snake” in pics (maybe cause AI or just a mistake), in such cases I ask the observer if they wanted one or the other IDed and maybe give an ID that represent both species for the moment.
I’ve to admit that this happened to me, but I don’t recall if someone tell me anything about theirs placeholders (I have found some really specific ones, think species names; but sometimes are just misspelled so is easy to help if you look for them).
I think this has been discussed elsewhere and some feature request have been made
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Hi Joshua, a lot of unknown-identifying issues have been hashed out, often to the “acceptable workaround” and/or feature request stage, in the main thread. It’s a long read but there’s some good thoughts in there. ;)
Meanwhile, I didn’t intend for this thread to be duplicative of that one’s discussion topics, but to split off any active/directed help requests/volunteering related to that discussion, like
-Hi I cleared https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?per_page=100&iconic_taxa=unknown&without_taxon_id=67333%2C131236%2C151817&project_id=city-nature-challenge-2021&photos=true for anyone who just likes to look at plants (true example) where most of the ferns may already be split out too
or
-Hi I would like someone to help me pick out the Unknown spiders of Africa
For those familiar with the Discord, think of this thread as an Unknown-focused, forum-based analog of work-party.
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I couldn’t find one, so I made one here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/split-plantae-into-several-iconic-taxa/24698
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Mine is the 12th vote there. Already.
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