I have written up a journal entry on INaturalist on how to differentiate between my two local species of Dandelion. I am new to naturalism generally, and was wondering if I could get some feedback on it.
Is this a helpful format? Is there a place to catelog things like this? Are there any glaring factual errors in it?
Journal: https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/justatrashpanda/98080-identification-of-dandelions-in-maryland
Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you have just accidentally landed in one of the biggest iNat forum controversies.
The problem is that the taxonomy used on iNat has split dandelions into hundreds of micro-species, so Taraxacum officinale and Taraxacum erythrospermum are in fact not the only dandelions found in Maryland.
See e.g. here to start with: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/overlooked-dandelion-diversity-in-bc-and-everywhere-in-north-america/3808
Youch.
Well that is extremely discouraging. All of the other guides I have found, including those from local official resources says different than that thread. Wikipedia even includes links to references that are in disagreement with those on the forum. (Wikipedia says for example that Red Seeded Dandelion is foundwidely in North America, the thread says that Taraxacum erythrospermum is not present at all on the contintent) Though the folks in that thread make compelling arguments for their positions, so I suspect the rest of the world is just behind the ball on this and will eventually catch up.
I felt confident in IDing them based on the various resources released by local conservation orgs, plus some more detailed guides from other areas with similar (or so I thought) distributions of Dandelions. Now I don’t even feel confident to say that something is a Common Dandelion.
How is anyone supposed to make a positive aid of anything, if I can’t even trust local conservation resources? And is it actually useful to have this split on iNat if barely anyone knows about it and even fewer people have the ability act on it?
Is there another way to capture this data? I have been having a lot of fun trying to ID the two varieties.
I can understand how this would be discouraging and sympathize. That said, I think this is overall one of the trickiest situations out there for a commonly observed species - in a sense, you’ve had bad luck to get partway down the rabbithole on this, when even the botanists don’t really understand or have consensus on it. But there are lots of other situations where the boundaries/guides are more clear that you can also work on.
I wish we had something like Wikipedia’s talk pages, but for discussions of the taxonomy. It would be good if I could make an annotation on the genus that notes all of those for the next person. (Plus it would be a good spot for keying information)
I will update my journal post with a link to the thread you linked, so that I don’t contribute to the problem further.
I still feel quite a sting from this (not your fault obviously). But I will get over it. I’ll bounce back, a lot of volunteers wouldn’t, in my experience with other projects. There should be a way to document this where it is easily and readily found so it doesn’t sting someone else in the future.
What would best practice for IDs that I have already made be? Withdrawal and link to the thread spiphany gave me?
In this case, I would go with:
and not worry too much. I have come to feel about the dandelion business much the way I feel about the mushroom business: when you have a whole bunch of people telling you what it isn’t, but none of them venture to suggest what it is or might be, they are essentially admitting that they don’t know. Which puts them on a par with everyone else who doesn’t know.
Best practice: Use the materials available to you. Be open to revision if you gain access to better materials. Don’t get worked up about naysayers.
other than the issue with dandelions being taxonomically messy, your guide did seem quite easy to read. I liked the bullet point and headings method of presenting the information, and linking examples meant the whole thing was compact and easy to skim.
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