Has anyone observed plant seedlings and/or cotyledons (seed leaves) in the wild and been able to identify them?
I germinate native plant seeds in San Diego and sometimes the seeds are unidentified in mixtures so when they come up I’d like to have an early idea of what they are.
Also, I’ve been taking photos in the spring when the wildflowers are just emerging and would like to learn to identify the seedlings.
Here’s some from Anza Borrego Desert State Park.
Perhaps there is an opportunity to grow native plant seedlings in order to record their appearance. It could be recorded in a Journal post, as the seedlings would be cultivated at that point. Similar to how some people rear parasitoids and lepidoptera in order to document various life stages.
There are some projects about seedlings. Here is mine as an example:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=seedlings-ca2167f5-364c-4d08-8516-d58eb6b0a6fe
Stephan, did you mean to link https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/seedlings-ca2167f5-364c-4d08-8516-d58eb6b0a6fe
Exactly. Thanks.
I try to upload young native plants from my garden for this reason. For example: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/123911859
If we could annotate for juvenile leaves / seedling / cotyledons – that would help.
We have larva / juvenile / nymph for animals.
Our invasive Australian wattles look quite different as seedlings with juvenile leaves.
There are a few plants where the cotyledons can be recognised in context - Impatiens glandulifera and Fagus sylvatica for two - and others that can be recognised to genus - Acer, Geranium and Malva.
I actually have been documenting cotyledons from native seeds I germinate.
Am a new Ambassador so am not sure what the Journal is used for. I thought it was just note taking on specific projects.
How would I use that to post the cotyledon photos?
Terrific. Thanks for sharing that. I’ll start a project for San Diego seedlings.
I’ll give the Journal a try with my cultivated seeds.
I agree, but not many people would actually use those annotations. Most people don’t even use the ones for flowers, fruits or seeds - even people who have many thousands of care observations
How could we make that annotation for seedlings happen?
I tried to start a project for seedlings from San Diego County but because there is no annotation for seedlings it just pulls in all the plant observations in the county.
We have a very long thread for – we need these missing annotations.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lets-talk-annotations/627
You would need to make a traditional project for seedlings – then you choose which obs to add.
I’ve germinated native plant seeds as well and documented some of the seedlings. That doesn’t necessarily mean I would feel confident recognizing them in the wild. The ones I’m pretty confident about are our locally native Impatiens species (but only to genus) and baby tulip trees.
Jewelweed:
Tulip tree:
For Anza Borrego Desert State Park, see my page:
https://tchester.org/bd/species/baby_annuals_morphology.html
Many of us tag our observations with “cotyledons” or “seedlings”. There are 174 observations with the tag “cotyledons”, and 229 obs tagged with “seedling”, in the Borrego Desert:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=95385&q=seedling&subview=map
I can identify cockleburrs and American Hog Peanut from cotelydons.
Also https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/cotyledons which has specific focus on the seed leaves.
