Amazing! Thanks for all the work!
I gave up after four pages. Winter must be really something there, leaving them with only about six taxa to observe over and over and over again.
oh, another hawthorn…oh, another rose… dried-up yarrow…hawthorn again… grass… another rose… another hawthorn…three more dried-up yarrow…
Still chewing thru the moving target of the last ‘thousand’ for Africa.
Hopefully before you build the new one - and maybe my African target will jump?
If we’re keeping the work on through the week, I for now stopped with Kemerovo and went to Yakutia, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?place_id=13220, for now there’re
2 994 observations in need of id, maybe you can’t id species, but if you can help with moving higher taxa down, that’s more than enough! But, quite many taxa there are found in NA too, so you may find something familiar. If you want to see RG plant observations, check here.
I think you are talking about the low growth project - it [Africa] has not changed. there should be no difference for you.
I can’t remember where on the forum I was whining about all the unidentified Queen Anne’s Lace, but I want to say a big thank you here to @sedgequeen for IDing so many of them!
Here’s something a bit different. As many of you will know, so-called lady beetles can be hosts to fungus species known collectively by the evocative appellation of Green Beetle Hangers or the romantically Latin moniker Complex Hesperomyces virescens.
Asian lady beetles (Harmonia axyridis) get them a lot. Until recently, it was common to call any such fungus on a lady beetle Hesperomyces virescens. It is now understood that He.v. includes cryptic species; the convention has been to identify any observations as Complex rather than the species.
As of very recently the one that infests Asian lady beetles is accepted as H. harmoniae and that species is accepted by iNat. That means that there are hundreds of observations IDed as He. v. that are strictly incorrect and many more that are, strictly speaking, correctly IDed as Complex He. v. but could clearly be identified to species as He. harmoniae. It would be a long and tedious job for the little group on iNat who know about things like beetle fungi but, citizen science being what it is, it would be a simple thing for a group of intrepid IDers such as those who hang out on this topic to split it up and take it on.
The discussion around this is here.
Yes? No? Maybe?
For a while I was sort of ‘competing’ but then I got sidetracked on the rhododendrons… If anyone wants to help on that quest, more info is here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/rhododendron-ponticum-in-the-us/22653
Thanks for the heads-up! I think I actually have a few of those among my own observations.
@lynnharper and before that @joedziewa are two other identifiers who recently worked on identifying Daucus carota and its relatives in North America. Thanks @annkatrinrose also! We whittled the pile down from over 14,000 to a little less than 10,000 in three weeks! Obviously there are a lot more to work on but I’m going to pay attention to other things for a while.
I got distracted by other things myself, but I should go back to Daucus carota for a while.
And thank you, too! I just read the R. ponticum discussion and, well, this is where I need to go do something other than iNat for a while (a just a few hours), because all I want to do upon reading that thread is bang my head against the wall.
After iding some moths from the project, it’s time to change directions a little bit, so today I’m at a new region, Perm Krai https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?place_id=139361, there’re now 8 013 obs in need of id, for me it’s 251 pages, out of them 9 are arachnids, so maybe I could ask @Ajott to help with those? As always RG flora can be found here for those willing to help.
I was busy trying to finish my own little year-project this week I had started earlier this year but got side-tracked a lot.
I am about to finish my ~9000 needs-ID-Pisauridae of Europe. It is little rewarding sometimes, so I understand why I was the first one agreeing with about half of those observations, despite it beeing actually very easy IDing the genuses. But often it can only go to genus with certainty for now. In some regions there are several similar species that can not be distinguished really… leading to a situation, where me going through those observations does not really decrease the needs ID pile for other IDers. :-/
I did use the “cannot be improved” quite some times now (for the first time) for Pisaura-observations where I am sure that they cannot be distinguished and several species occur in a region. But for Dolomedes (also present with two species in most european countries) there seem to be a lot of people with strong opinions despite missing strong effidence… even if you just agree to genus (without disagreeing) you get quite some backlash. It can get annoying at times. So I get why a lot of IDers just leave them be
However, I am almost done now and aim to keep up in real time with the new incoming ones in the next season.
Well, since there is no standard number of base pair differences to define a species, perhaps an easier approach would be to a take a “lumper’s” point of view and hold that this complex is really just intraspecies variation. Then they’re all correct again.
The “Yes? No? Maybe?” was with reference to the idea of people taking on the task of parsing a large backlog of officially incorrect IDs created by the change in iNat’s definitions and maybe bumping some nominally correct high-level IDs to species. The philosophical questions, however interesting, would be off topic and (just this once) I will resist the urge to go there.
I hasten to add that IDing to species requires only the ability to ID an Asian lady beetle while telling the difference between a fairly distinct, translucent, greenish fungus that manifests as little finger-like projections and the specks of dust that a pretty remarkable number of folks insist are beetle hanger fungi, expert opinion be damned. Dead easy for the ID hotshots hanging in this thread.
Not that it’s Friday today, but:
It’s about four and a half months till the 2023 City Nature Challenge, and yet over 24,000 observations from the 2022 CNC remain as true Unknowns, assuming I filtered correctly (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?iconic_taxa=unknown&project_id=city-nature-challenge-2022&identified=false). I think I see a lot of Dicots in my future.
Not Friday, but close enough. I just IDed over 450 Atocion observations in the US today. Since, every Atocion species in the US is Atocion armeria, I all I really needed to do was confirm that it was Atocion. There were a surprising amount of misidentifications that happened to actually be phlox, true catchflies, annual honesty, and carnations. For those looking to get the last ~50 observations to research grade, look for indented, hot pink, five-petaled flowers, with hairless stems (or with brown/yellow sticky areas below nodes), long, simple, opposite, smooth, elliptical leaves.
Here’s the link if anyone would like to attempt: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=1&taxon_id=204204
Be careful not to confuse with similar looking species.
I’m sorry, but that person who uploaded all that mess, still active, and doesn’t want to do some basic work and id 9 pages of own observations shouldn’t get ids, plus duplicates, omg.
Oof that sucks :( the worst kind of user! Maybe a direct message to them would be appropriate?
Well I’m bored and need something to distract me for a while, this seems as good of any of a thing to go through tonight.