I am not asking for people to identify anything here. I am just trying to figure out what the best is to get all the different kinds of lichen in this photo identified.
I took this photo and, quite honestly, I think it could be a piece of artwork for the wall. My problem is, there are so many types of lichen on this rock that are so intermingled, it is impossible for iNat to tell them apart. iNat gives tons of suggestion but says it is not sure about any of them. I was hoping to find a group somewhere where I could get all of the different types IDed, but I don’t know what type of group would even contain experts in this field.
What is the best way to deal with a photo like this?
I suggest the way to tackle it is to post the same photo as several separate observations with a pointer at a different lichen each time. But I also have to say you are unlikely to get many lichens identified from a photo like this.
If you’re on Facebook there’s a Lichen Identification page and a Lichen, Mosses, Ferns and Fungi page. Someone of those pages may be able to give you a rough ID of the families at least.
You can just duplicate the observation as many times as necessary while specifying which lichen to ID. Or create some other type of indicator as suggested above (like a pointer, circle). You could also crop the image to the lichen you wish for each observation.
I typically make a copy for each species (I think) there is, and then have each of the thumbnail photos set to a crop centered on the species of interest. That or colored/numbered circles, with the description saying which color/number the obs is for.
Yes, but how do I know which Lichen iNat is identifying in the picture? That would be a great feature to add to iNat, is a Highlight feature where the object that iNat is identifying is highlighting the picture. if there are multiple, touching on different ones would highlight the ones that iNat is referring to.
if you upload the main photo PLUS a cropped version to each observation, put the cropped version as the first one. That way, iNat will just be looking at the photo with a single species.
When referring to iNat I assume you just mean the CV and not the community?
Humans can get the reference of an arrow or a note in the description, if you want the AI(CV) to try then you will have to crop the image.
But that being said, please don’t trust the CV suggestions for crustose lichens on rocks, there are very few species it will correctly identify, it is better to leave it at a higher level and wait for a regional expert.
Agreeing with @dgwdoesthings, I wouldn’t blind faith the CV model not non-animals + non-plants (and by iNat i thought you meant the community). I believe that for like lichen in particular, you tend to need both close ups and environment pics to get close to the species-level.
A highlights feature seems like a bit much imo since it’s fairly trivial to crop a picture on your phone, upload, then revert the changes. Feels like the devs might have bigger fish to fry. Merlin bird app does a thing where it makes you zoom in until the bird fills the screen, which I guess is what you’re looking for?
With AI power these days, these kinds of programming achievements are not as hard as they used to be. However, it was just a suggestion. Yes, the Merlin apps has a very simple interface that allows you to zoom and crop just the thing you want to ID. Something like this would be fairly easy to implement in the iNat app.
It is not a matter of a programming achievement but rather the things you want identifications of (lichens on rock) usually cannot be identified to species based on photos from a distance, even macrophotography often doesn’t show the information required to determine the species.
If the info to tell what it is isn’t there any program which attempts to make a guess will just be wrong.
Just a normal, non-biologist, guy with a smartphone having fun. A lot of this uber technical, down to the DNA level, classification system, seems a bit excessive to me for common user purposes.
I am glad you are having fun! Just stating the unfortunate reality that many lichens cannot be id’d at sight alone.
That being said, most do not need dna work either or expensive equipment. Though I understand it is beyond most peoples’ scope, chem tests can be done with cheap and easily available chemicals and even the cheapest scope can provide enough resolution to tell diagnostic features.
If down to species is excessive for you, as @DianaStuder said you can leave it at Class Lecanoromyctes as nearly all common lichens are covered by that and maybe someone who knows more and recognizes it can help you out at some point in the future.
The point of iNat is to connect people with nature so as long as you are enjoying yourself take pictures of all the lichens you want and leave the finer level identifications to others (just don’t leave your observations unknown).
“even macrophotography often doesn’t show the information required to determine the species”
As a regular non-biologist user just having fun, this level of specificity is beyond my scope of expertise or goal. I leave that level of dedication to the experts.
