Wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of a good, comprehensive yet easy to follow tutorial/ guide on how to use the BRAHMS search engine for plants? I’ve got the basics down but apparently there’s alot more functionalities involving filters for phenological characteristics which I’m unable to find
It’s a marvelous tool when it comes to narrowing down lists of plants for your area and perhaps iNat should consider incorporating it as a feature?
If you click on the home page, there are three video tutorials on how to use it. For example you can draw a rectangle (not a circle or polygon) and filter for species and specimens in that polygon (Video 3). But you can also do that with the iNaturalist map and also the GBIF map which is available through the map layers. GBIF already contains all these South African data as well as Inaturalist Research grade data.
Tony make no mistake, the comparison features of iNat are excellent. Furthermore, they are very intuitive and easy to learn and get used to, an area which, I feel, BRAHMS still has alot of catching up to do
However, I feel that BRAHMS could be a useful supplement to iNat due purely to the fact that it holds far more information on each taxon than iNat alone does, atleast so far. E.g. some species, genera even Family’s are very under-observed on iNat and because of this information particularly on their distribution and what they look like (quality photos) is often lacking. BRAHMS compensates for this by linking to various different botanical and research sites (Kew, JSTOR, etc.). There’s also filters for distinguishing between growth forms (chamaephytes, hemi-cryptophytes) and other phenological characters which I stumbled into the other day but can’t seem to find again