It should simplify your work with plants which have an indeterminate growth and will display buds, flower buds and fruits until the frost kills them. I dont think there is a system of reporting that is both simple, perfect and easy to interpret for every plant species.I can see why phenological networks have people reporting observations like buds, flowers etc… At times vegetative and reproductive phases can overlap. In agronomy, if there is a need to know or to record precisely the phase for a crop, we use standardised scales. The most widespread, the BBCH-scale, is divided in main growth phases and there are indictators when you enter them, for example, you end the inflorescence emergence and enter the flowering phase when the first flower opens. Botanists must have a tough job harmonising how to report phenological phases with so many wild species with peculiar life cycle.
Thank you for bringing this up!!
In animals this is super useful for different stages of life and for users to be able to sort photos based on life stage. Often times larval or juvenile stages looks confusingly different from adults.
I’ve recently gone on a binge to annotate all gastropod egg cases in Florida to help future IDs and recognition.
Thank you for this! I asked a question about Annotations during a CNC web conference and the other participants were kind of so-so about how useful they are.
I ascribed my early habit of using Annotations whenever I upload an Observation (as much as I know, which is sometimes more than I know about the species–yeah, it’s flowering; what is it?) to a career spent working with databases and spreadsheets. I’m used to filling out all the applicable fields.
But there’s an awful lot of Observations missing Annotations and I wasn’t sure if it would be worth the effort to tackle a bunch. Apparently it is.
PS: Looking for a plant that I could view for flowering season, I chose Red Deadnettle. I didn’t even notice the stuff until iNat; now I see it everywhere! Anywho, that led to reading about the plant, finding out it’s edible, instructions for making tea… In short, there is fresh-picked Red Deadnettle drying on my kitchen counter, which will become afternoon tea.
I think I’ve done 3 plants for my state so far. It is time-consuming for plants with a lot of observations because of all the scrolling back and forth to get the “next” one. But you do get to know that plant a lot better from looking at all the photos - each point in the life-cycle. And you can confirm some IDs along the way for plants that are very unique/easy to ID.
Glad I read this thread before I stacked up a pile of observations. Thanks everybody.
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