You might consider excluding the county surrounding Auburn Univ. from your searches. As I recently saw explained in another thread, you can exclude places and other characteristics from your searches: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/search+urls#exclude
Hey, welcome to the other side (forums) as well… we ran into each other during identifying before, as I recall! And you picked the best place to start :-)
Yeah I would if I had any clue who was using it in their classes. Wes who runs AL Master Naturalist is out if Auburn and is going to send an email around to the department about it. He has a great short powerpoint to onboard folk to iNat which he uses at the MN classes, so I suggested he send that out too. Hes on board, its just figuring out who is doing it there.
And yes i can just exclude Auburn but i do have copypastes to onboard students like this that i use; because I do want to explain things nicely so they keep using it. There are many others here who dont put explanations. So i try to be the “friendly face” but when I get irritated i know to stop xD
Thanks for the help and letting me rant :) it helps me to just blahhhh n get it out there :)
Having cleared (for now) the Unknowns in the Greater and Lesser Antilles, I moved on to Quintana Roo, and now Campeche.
In Campeche, it sure would be nice to go just one page without seeing Bidens or Leucaena, or both. Those two are examples of the seemingly random taxa that large numbers of people somehow agree to fixate on.
There are over 14,000 “needs ID” observations of Daucus in North America. The great majority of them are D. carota (Wild Carrot, Queen Anne’s Lace) and most (but not all!) of the D. carota are identifiable.
I’ve been doing a few and also pulled out some yarrow, water and poison hemlock, and a few other things I wasn’t able to narrow down to species that I’m sure are not Daucus.
I spent today going over the ecology class’s project; all sudden had some interesting uploads this week that it was due today xD (in this case, i know the professor, they are onboarded very well, structured well so no one has to try to cheat or even should be tempted to…unless forgot about it all semester ;) ) So that was fun. Would’ve been at SAR but one last week off for my ankle sigh. But, I am down to under 400 pages of Alabama backlog!
Okay I have searched this but I didn’t find An Answer and i think this is an ok open thread to ask in:
The auburn students…
There is an arboretum there, and most observations are of the same plants in the arboretum over and over. I believe I can mark these as captive/cultivated, yes? Even if they are native species? In another thread it seemed that botanical gardens was deemed as cultivated since humans planted and care for it. I just want to make sure I am correct because that could make dealing with the laziness more satisfying to see a ‘casual’ tag (is that horrible of me? but i need motivation haha!) To add: whenever I mark that tag I do try to leave a note, explaining captive/cultivated and encouraging to try to find wild things out in nature.
In most cases trees in arboreta are human planted. There may be a few instances where the trees were wild and someone put in a trail and signage and started calling it an arboretum, but for the most part arboreta/botanic(al) gardens tend to showcase planted exotic species .
Or even more confusing, a mix of wild/preexisting natural trees and exotic planted ones… I am looking at you, Hoyt Arboretum in Portland, OR.
Yes, native species can be cultivated, too. We have a native plant garden in town and except for the obvious invasive weeds probably everything there should be marked cultivated. One side effect of this that I’ve run into is that iNat “learns” that certain native species are cultivated in that area and will start marking them so automatically even if they are not part of the garden and should be wild. That’s something to keep an eye on. Depending on species and how many cultivated observations have been posted for it in one small area (e.g. students observing on campus, or within an arboretum/garden), you may have to start marking others of the same species as “wild” to counteract iNat’s automatic marking for that county.
