A community member recently reached out with an interesting idea: they’d like to create a project dedicated to documenting cotyledons of native plants.
This seems like a fantastic initiative, however, we’ve hit a common snag: iNaturalist doesn’t have a specific filter or trait for “cotyledons.” Using a broad taxon filter like “Plants” would include millions of observations of mature plants, making the project unusable for its intended purpose.
what is the most effective way to build this? Our initial thought is to recommend a Collection Project, but we are falling if reaching these cotyledon observations. Has anyone else tackled a similar challenge for a specific, non-standard plant stage or feature?
Your project should be for Angiospermae(flowering plants) if you want anything cotyledonous. If you only want dicots, you would need Magnoliopsida(dicots). Monocots is Liliopsida.
For seedlings you could check who has annotated for seedlings although I don’t know if that is the case.
You could only do this with a collection project if they worked with observation fields; then you could add an observation field (e.g. one of these) indicating that observations have cotyledons and they’d automatically be filtered into the project. There’s a feature request for that here. In the meantime, you’d need to use a traditional project. Or just use the already-existing observation fields if they serve your purpose without needing to create a project. Adding to a traditional project takes just as much effort as adding an observation field anyways, so they seem equivalent to me.