Filtering Fungi Obs for a Project on Spalting

[jessicaleighallen]

I am seeking suggestions for how to set up a project that would collect observations of wood spalting. Unfortunately, spalting is not an organism but instead the wood-staining result of an action performed by a variety of fungi. Observations of the fungi are numerous, but it’s the resulting wood-coloration I am seeking to collect in a sort of gallery of example images.

I performed a filtered worldwide search including the words spalt and spalting and found only 10 observations currently saved to my Faves - and most are by users who recognize they’ve observed spalting, but who (like me) are not 100% certain of which fungus or fungi created the resulting wood-coloration. Thus, most are IDed as Fungi Including Lichens.

This is my question: Is it possible to filter Taxa to only those including the term spalt or spalting in the notes/description or tags? If not, does anyone have a suggestion for how to set the Terms & Rules for such a Project without every fungus growing on a wood substrate filtering into it?

I recognize I may set the rules to include the most common staining fungi (blue stain fungi, for example) and it will probably yield interesting results but images like those I linked above are less likely to be pulled into a Project unless the user added a descriptive tag regarding the spalting process.

Any suggestions will be appreciated – Thanks!

[bouteloua]

It sounds like you might want to create a traditional project (manually select observations to add to the project) or use an observation field rather than a collection project (automatically adds observations based on the limited options in the filters, can’t manually add or remove observations).

There isn’t currently a way to include observations in a collection project based on tags or keywords used in the description, although there is a feature request to do so. But, as you say, not everyone will add that word as a tag or description.

[alex_abair]

Not an answer to your question, but a search for “zone lines” may continue to be helpful as well (although it also yields a lot of unrelated fungal observations). I found this example using that search term:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/36062968

And another one from “wood+lines”:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/36998291

[jessicaleighallen]

I really appreciate the suggestions @bouteloua & @alex_abair - I am leaning toward a more manual search b/c I think it is true that many users will not recognize this resulting patterning as spalting.

I may just keep adding examples to my Favorites until I have a good idea how users label their obs!