Hey everyone, I wanted to see if anyone has already got a solution to a problem I’ve found myself in with identifications.
I’m trying to ID Philodendron (a genus in the Araceae) to species level, but there are over 600 accepted species. So I’ve started using a collection of notes (in Obsidian) where I take notes on species characteristics, differences and links to useful websites. It’s great that I can link species to each other and create a taxonomic network. However, I feel like there is a lot of information I cannot quickly access this way. For one, geographical information is hard to access. Let’s say I encounter an interesting Philodendron on iNat in Costa Rica, I’d like to be able to just filter by “species occurring in Costa Rica” to see which species are actually present. Also, because there are so so many species, I cannot put all the important taxonomic characters into a short summary. There are just too many characters that are important in different species contexts (e.g. species A and B differ by one thing, but species B and C differ by something else and so on).
I was thinking of creating a database, because that would allow me to more easily filter the species. (I’m comfortable writing R code, but I guess this would be overkill for this? But I’m totally unfamiliar with actual database stuff like SQL.) If I’d get a good solution for this running, I’d also like to have this information available online so other identifiers can profit from it as well.
So far, the note-taking has helped me already in being able to get a better overview and to remember many more species. But I’m sure other avid identifiers have found better solutions to these kinds of problems. So, how do you tackle this?
Here is a screenshot of my current note-taking system in Obsidian:
There are probably people on here who can give you much more sophisticated advice than I can. But no one has answered so far, so I’ll jump in. I suspect the first step is to reduce your descriptive text to a series of choices that can go in a spreadsheet.
Recorded from Venezuela yes/ no
Leaf mid-rib hairy / hairless
That kind of thing. That would allow you to pick a character which you can see in an observation and select all the species which have that character. Then pick another character and reduce the first subset to a smaller subset, and so on.
I think this is Fantastic! But part of me thinks why are there so many species to begin with? and don’t they all hybridize like crazy (This is the Arum family after all, extremely difficult taxonomically)? Perhaps this is why they are so tricky?
What you are trying to do is create a key to identifying each Philodendron to species. Likely such a key may already exist. If we know how many species exist, even approximately, then we know what features separate one species from another. Finding such a key is often a challenge to find.
If the Araceae family is complicated, it might be helpful to find how the genera are identified. There are likely lots of Needs ID observations in Araceae waiting to be moved to genus. Looking through these can be a great learning experience.
Thanks for your replies so far :)
@jhbratton This would probably be a good idea, yes. I’ve had already begun doing that but it is a massive task and I thought, maybe I ask around here first before I do a lot of work for nothing (i.e . if I’d want to change my methodology later on).
@norwichtim I’m familiar with aroids, yes (I’ve already done over 22000 IDs of them). And no, with new species being described constantly and most of them restricted to only very specific locations, there isn’t a unifying key to them. Instead, there are lots of out-of-date keys for specific locations…
@professor_porcupine there certainly are hybrids, but so far I’ve only encountered very few (like 1-2 hybrid species). It is indeed a very diverse group of plants, but that’s also part of the fun :)
Just to clarify though, my question isn’t really about aroids or plants. It is if there are better ways to store and sort taxonomic data for better identification, regardless of the specific taxa.
