FloraForum: A Place to Chat About Plants

This thread is inspired by my friend @wvbirder’s Birding/Birdwatching Discussion Topic, and is a place to talk about, post pictures of, and learn about plants. Please keep it clean, and please know that the focus here is on plants, preferrably wild. You can share your plantnatting stories, and show us your observations or pictures of rare or endangered plants, or just plants you find cool or interesting.

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If you have a more specific discussion topic, I think that’s more appropriate for the forum. Chatrooms like Discord are more amenable to these types of general discussions.

And if people want to share observations of plants, that’s what iNat itself is for!

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I hope not. The forum works fine as it is. There is no benefit I can see from creating a plant ghetto. The bird one is now over a thousand entries and no sub- headings so there is no way of telling if any of it would be of interest without scrolling through the whole thing.

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we have both sorts of threads. we are by no means merging threads en masse.

there are some threads that are a discussion of a specific issue, which require a lot of thought, and there of course reading the entire previous conversation is beneficial.

other threads are highly casual, almost like a chat room. if a coherent series of comments on a specific idea comes out of it, I can certainly split those away into a new, fresh topic.

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I find it extremely easy to sort of ignore threads that do not interest me and so don’t ever look at the giant bird one and likely would never look at a similar one about plants, even though I do very much like plants and birds.

That said, this confuses me.

Because one of the Guidelines for the Forum is this:

  • Don’t post no-content replies.

Just now at a glance, many of the comments in that behemoth of a bird thread appear to be just that. (Sorry!) Lots of “Cool!” And “Wow!” with no other content where a heart would have likely communicated the same appreciation for a particular post. (A bit of me knows that at one point there may have been a push to get it to 1000 posts and thinks those may be contributory posts toward that goal.)

TL;DR: Broad threads seem ambiguous and overly chatty to me (and I am what is lovingly referred to here as a chachalaca), which is likely why I do not participate even though I very much do care for birds and plants. I think the participants might find a chat room setting better suited to their casual style but I also find it easy enough to ignore these threads should they choose to keep these conversations here.

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Having seen a few other threads get subsumed into the Birding/Birdwatching thread, I hope that this will not become a pattern. A thread where that occurs will become unwieldy and hard to follow. I see that jhbratton already commented on this:

I seem to remember that at one time, the idea was floated to split the “What is your favorite lifer” thread in a similar way to the wiki about papers that use iNaturalist data: break it off by years. But that seems unlikely to happen now that it has become such a popular fixture. I have to admit that I don’t post to that thread as often as I might like because I worry that it will become a browser-crashing “Gerald” if it goes on too long.

Is this topic really much broader than that one? People post just about any taxon there, with (sometimes multiple) images.

Lifers of the Week consists of 2400+ posts over 43 months.
Birds, Birds, Birds has generated 1300+ posts in under four months.

One is growing at a much quicker rate, I would say.

I think for me the difference is that one thread initiated and has maintained a tighter focus, as defined by the first posts of both threads, regardless of how many taxa are included in each thread. Or images, which both threads have many of!

(By those same criteria (multiple taxa! many images!), one could be concerned about almost any thread I have begun, be it camouflage or creatures in the home, or what have you. One is welcome to express such concern, of course, though I would again note how easy it is to ignore any thread in which one is disinterested.)

Final note: As I have not kept up with the Birding one and am really quite new to the Lifer one, I am not aware of threads that have been consolidated into either or previous discussions regarding them. I have at times suggested both threads to Forum newcomers.

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I’ve found a nice plant the other day:


https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/259754407
Any ID is welcome :wink:

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I have nothing against those threads, but like you, I don’t follow them. I think, however, it would become annoying if there are too many. The issue with these more chatty mega threads is that they always float around at the top of the list, so at some point I imagine they would begin to drown out more niche posts.
I do think that the iNat Discord server is a better place for these types of discussions, at any rate.

At the same time, I do like the “favourite lifer” and the “iNat milestone” threads, even though they are mega-threads too. I feel like they are different in some way.

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They are different . Milestones and lifers are more defined. If they get “too long” they could be separated into say… years.
The other topics are general chats. I wasn’t finding much substance. A lot of “I saw a bird” followed by “good for you”.

I tried searching for a user called fayebryan96 and it said no results.

@Faye and @ra_teo Just a reminder that the forum isn’t a place to ask for ID help on specific observations. Thanks!

My apologies!

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Sorry!

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dicot :P