#IdentiFriday is the happiest day of the week

I literally didn’t learn it wasn’t native until I photographed one for my “things on our land” guidebook I"m making earlier this year. I uploaded it here, and bam it’s not native? I had no clue. It’s interesting learning how many plants are not native that are so commonplace here. I always knew the kudzu and privet…but this and also white clover both surprised me.

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Hey, I saw you going through these! I know I had a few at just “Bees” not too long ago - I appreciate the IDs! It at least lets me know where to start looking to learn more. Thanks!

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Hah, I can join that party for the southeastern US. I pulled a bunch of it out of my yard this summer to the point that I’ve developed contact dermatitis. At first, I thought I had gotten into poison ivy without noticing, but I always watch out for that. I eventually realized I always got that nasty itch after pulling out Queen Anne’s Lace. I didn’t think I needed gloves for that one since it’s edible and all, but boy it taught me differently. So I’m pretty familiar with what it looks (and smells) like. A few years ago, I left a few plants that volunteered in a corner of my front yard when I saw black swallowtail caterpillars on it. Big mistake - it misunderstood the intention and is trying to take over my entire yard.

For IDs, there are a few things that could be confused with it at various stages and especially if there’s nothing but leaves or just a big blurry umbel of white flowers with no other details showing on pictures, but if it has a dark pinkish-purple flower in the middle of the umbel it is clearly Daucus carota (apparently it helps with attracting pollinators). I find the buds/seeds to be quite distinctive, too.

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Interesting - good thing the leaves are SO different!

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So far, it’s not in my yard, although I’ve got all sorts of other not-so-lovely invasives. I had no idea it could cause contact dermatitis!

That was a surprise for me, too. Fortunately it’s just the leaves and not the roots - I can handle and eat carrots just fine.

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In one topic people described how any Apiaceae can be dangerous to skin, but it’s really a personal thing, I touched every one of them I met and never had a problem, even with Heracleum, cause if you don’t get juices on you, it’s harmless.

I wonder then - carrot top pesto - if that no longer triggers allergies. (I can’t touch cut raw potatoes … but properly cooked is fine)

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No idea - I haven’t tried carrot top pesto, not keen on finding out if that triggers something. I would think though that probably whatever causes the reaction may be broken down by cooking.

Potatoes - yes - I have done the skin allergy test with both. Great red blisters versus not at all! (That is genetic apparently)

Carrot top pesto tastes delicious - but not if you have contact dermatitis of course.

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felt a bit lazy this week, so no new or difficult taxa this weekend, just couple of hundreds of Argiope, Pisauridae and Oxyopidae of Europe and the world

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(incoming rant…)

Ughhh identifying today…and I’m done. Auburn students with new accounts posting a ton of plants in front of buildings. I really cannot handle this right now >_< I am stopping because I am done being polite LOL so I won’t ruin their iNat by being rude so I’m stopping.

Luckily…the person running Alabama Master Naturalist is from Auburn, so I finally have a contact :P I emailed them and asked if they can share their power point on using iNat to their collegues so students can be properly onboarded and also suggested they do what Alabama does…create a projects for the class that students must join which creates accountability and honestly since then I rarely have issues with the other universities - because we know who to notify with issues and since professors are busy and dont want to deal with such notifications, they take the time to onboard students to iNat,. ;)

I cleared out almost 5 pages of GPS tagged at Auburn U landscape plants, and even more pages are back on refresh…it’s happening now live from the mobile ap. sigh

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I don’t normally ID in Alabama, but maybe I can help clear some for you. I’ll skim off some very obvious cultivated.

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I looked through cultivated plants for a few long hours yesterday, finding many common ornamentals in RG already. There’s an absurd number of uploads from the UNM and CNM campuses in Albuquerque, so I feel your pain.

Please give yourself a break and, when you come back, focus on another region/taxa (maybe draw a box that excludes Auburn).

We can only do so much as volunteers and the professors need to be accountable if their students are sowing chaos.

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Yeah, it’s always good if you can contact the instructor or project manager directly. They should be responsible for their participants, to some extent. And they generally have more sway over these users.

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My local students decided to ID/DQA their own obs with sockpuppet accounts this year, so that’s extra fun.

(Or at least it looks like sockpuppet accounts to me, although I haven’t reported them since I can’t prrove it. I contacted a teacher and got no reponse.)

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Hey, I am sweeping through Pisauridae in Europe at the moment, especially Pisaura in Ukraine right now. They are often incorrectly identified to species, while there are two species (at least in east Ukraine) that cannot be distinguished by habitus.

So what I am doing now is correcting the ID if necessary, leaving a copy-paste-comment, go to DQA tab and marking good as it can be, go to next observation and back to info-tab to give my ID - repeat.

Adding this DQA takes so much longer (click the tap, click the right DQA, go back to info-tab)… I wonder if you guys know a nice trick that makes it faster? Otherwise I will probably skip that step again after I am done with the Ukraine

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I think the teachers also need to teach their students what wild species look like. I suspect many students have never spent much time outside of landscaped surroundings and so actually don’t know that, for example, the big trees all around the edges of a city park were most likely planted 50 to 100 years ago.

This hit home for me when I visited a very different landscape than what I’m used to. I couldn’t always tell if something had been planted or not - and I’m a trained biologist with decades of experience and four years on iNaturalist! But I’ve lived only in the northeastern US; visiting Mexico meant I needed to learn how people there landscaped their yards and farmed the land (I didn’t know what sugar cane fields looked like, for example). How can we expect city-dwelling college students to know what’s wild if no one teaches them?

Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly energetic, I think about starting a project just for people new to iNat in my region, meant to help them through their first months of using the system. You’d have to watch for new accounts and invite them to join via private message or a comment on their observations (and include instructions on how to join and what a project even is!). You’d have to write weekly journal posts explaining all the ins and outs of iNat, plus where to go, how to learn what species are, how to tell wild from cultivated plants, how to take good photos, how to start IDing, why they should donate to iNat, and on and on. The good part would be that such in-depth journal posts could be recycled and updated every three months or so, as new people join. You could even celebrate observers’ 100th observations! Have a few field trips and meet-ups! It could be a lot of fun!

And then I come to my senses and realize how much work that would be and I hesitate to start such a project.

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One way to get around making this a huge ongoing effort may be to hold a BioBlitz that is limited in time. We did one last month at our university and it was a busy but fun week. In addition to writing journal posts for the BioBlitz project, we had a website with links to resources and instructions, YouTube videos explaining how iNat works, and a few in-person workshops, observation outings, and Zoom help sessions. While the event has passed, some of these resources will remain to be available and hopefully helpful for new users.

Also, yes, the #1 question and issue that came up was a lot of “captive/cultivated” observations and participants (as well as instructors sending their students out to make observations for class credit) not knowing what that even meant. And not everyone comes to group events, reads instructions or watches videos. I had to explain this several times to students reporting issues with their observation count in the project going down rather than up. In total, 27% of all the observations made for the BioBlitz were so far marked captive/cultivated and dropped out of the project. It is a learning curve for sure, especially for first time users.

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What a great project!! And helpful to me, too. I hope to do some of that with next year’s City Nature Challenge, and I hope my co-organizer and I can do half what you all did!