Mangroves are easily recognizable as such, but they come from a broad cross-section of families and, as such, there is no single taxon category that captures all of them (other than something way too broad, such as "flowering plants). It would be helpful for both observers and identifiers of mangro…

[image] JayAvery: If a ‘mangroves’ category was to be created, then countless other polyphyletic categories would be requested too, and it would completely change the entire identification system. Yeah, this isn’t a taxonomic concept we would go along with, it would open the floodgates. I wou…

Actually ‘butterflies’ does exist as it is a discrete taxonomic concept https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47224-Papilionoidea I don’t know enough about mangroves to intelligently comment, but is it broader than this family? https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/60337-Rhizophoraceae

My bad re: butterflies, maybe it’s just moths that is polyphylletic? My understanding is there are several plant species that aren’t that closely related that are considered mangrove as they have a parallel ecological niche via evolutionary convergence.

[image] charlie: My understanding is there are several plant species that aren’t that closely related that are considered mangrove as they have a parallel ecological niche via evolutionary convergence. Yes, https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/search?iconic_taxa=47126&q=mangrove Seems like a jo…

This feature seems very unlikely to be implemented because it completely goes against inat’s usual reliance on strict taxonomic hierarchy in identification. If a ‘mangroves’ category was to be created, then countless other polyphyletic categories would be requested too, and it would completely chang…

If all plants that count as mangroves have “mangrove” somewhere in the common name (and no plants that are not mangroves have “mangrove” somewhere in the name), then it should still be able to pull up this group using common names.

It’s one of those “all butterflies are moths, but not all moths are butterflies” issues. Butterflies are pretty specific, but moths are essentially anything within the larger clade that’s not a butterfly. Mangroves are different because they’re ecologically categorized and share distinctive charac…

many of the url hacks that give taxon as a parameter can take comma delimited lists of taxa. If you can identify the “families” or parent level taxa, perhaps a query string can be built from those.

Toward the end of this thread there was some discussion about possibly making a request to create searchable taxon-level user fields (and/or possibly system-defined annotations) analogous to the fields or annotations currently available at the observation level. I don’t think this was ever followed…

That’s a good idea, but it seems to be more of a help if you’re looking for species to ID rather than helping on the observation side of thing.

Yes it’s considerably larger than Rhizophoraceae. Mangroves also include members of the Acanthaceae, Lythraceae, Combretaceae, and Arecaceae families. Rather than being lumped within one family they’re groups more by ecological role and shared characteristics. Mangroves of very different families…

Create a ID category called "mangroves" that captures the different families that make up mangrove species

Feature Requests

tgbirdnerd October 2, 2019, 6:29pm 20

It would be best to see separate placeholders for various types of butterflies, such as sulphurs.

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Create a ID category called "mangroves" that captures the different families that make up mangrove species

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