I recently attended the annual conference of the American Arachnological Society and there was a lot of discussion about iNaturalist. A lot of folks expressed interest in using iNat, but a short-coming that was highlighted (and a reason many folks still preferred using BugGuide) was the lack of info…

There’s some related discussion here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/adding-useful-id-info-to-taxon-pages/657

to work around the format issue, maybe it could be something modular similar to the way the observation fields are, where a field can be added as a block to the identification page? this could apply to tables and graphics as well, if someone were willing to code that into the site ;P since iNat uses…

[PlntTrtsLYTHCURT3] Folks need to take the dichotomous keys and reflect them in Photoshop and deliver as a single jpeg. Here is one for a plant species, but these need to be made for each species (i.e., marriage of dichotomous keys to simple jpegs and photography). One person doing this save so muc…

[image] nomolosx: (add support for linking BugGuide info pages through links so wikipedia isn’t the only source?) That support already exists. If you look on the iNat taxon page of any taxon that should be covered by BugGuide, click the About tab, and on the right-hand side under More Info, …

oh yes, I’m aware of this. it’s a great feature to be able to link info pages from different sites to taxon pages. I worded it a bit clunky — I was thinking more along the lines of the way a wikipedia page is embedded into the site, where the info is available on the “about” page. If the text or dat…

if I could vote on that I would! I think that would be super helpful. I’m planning on creating identification guides in my journal at some point when I have the time, but having a community-led wiki would be the ideal answer to this imo.

From a similar discussion in 2019 : I’m going to close this topic because during the retreat we discussed wanting to move forward with a way for user-contributed information to be added to a taxon’s page, although it might be a bit different that what’s proposed here. I should have more details in …

@tiwane - Ping for question above ^

Sorry. It’s still there, but functionality that reduces scaling issues is the top priority at the moment, primarily life lists and subscriptions.

Expand the Similar Species tab into an editable identification guide

Feature Requests

bouteloua August 4, 2020, 6:44pm 10

sounds like the same as this one https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-comments-or-wiki-like-functionality-on-taxa-pages-to-discuss-identification-and-other-relevant-issues/91/17?

Topic		Replies	Views
Are you fine with the current format of iNat’s species descriptions, or do you wish there was more info like how to identify the species etc? General	86	1897	March 16, 2026
Where do we share how to ID species? Nature Talk	44	1111	July 23, 2025
Create an "identification center" with guides, curated subcategories, events, and more Feature Requests web	54	3308	July 21, 2026
The Future of iNat: What Would You Like To See Improved? General	67	1851	April 1, 2026
Add an interactive system to glean diagnostic features from identifiers and show them to observers Feature Requests	18	2982	August 12, 2020

Expand the Similar Species tab into an editable identification guide

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