(Someone should fail the teacher)
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@pisum I just wished for something like this, and started to wonder how I could do it, and there it is!
I am so grateful for all of the brilliant crocus and tulip and iris identifiers from the Caucuses etc. I’m glad they have time for us after they’ve IDd everything locally!
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Common mugwort – Artemisia vulgaris. It’s the hot thing in the Northeastern US. Everybody wants to ID it. Because it’s so…ubiquitous?
If others with experience in IDing this would join the party (that I did not start, but party-crashed), that’d be great.
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While I can certainly help ID this plant, I have been reluctant to do so in the past as I’m not familiar with Artemisia at the genus level. I just have not had time to determine which other species exist in the Northeast and how similar they are to A. vulgaris. As you said, it’s ubiquitous, and certainly easy to recognize in the field. Any insights?
Oops. When I noted here a few days ago that identifiers had reduced the numbers of Unknowns left from the 2023 CNC from 1325 pages to 600 or so (at 30 observations a page), I must have had a filter on, because today there are 813 pages. Still a substantial decrease, but I made a mistake - sorry about that!
Also, I wish that once every six months, iNat would send out an email and a personal message to each observer with more than 10 Unknowns, reminding them to assign an initial ID to those observations. I really don’t mind the new observers taking some time to figure things out, but I do wish the observers with thousands of observations would clean up behind themselves.
I also wish Artemisia weren’t such a confusing genus in my region, but that’s just my brain protesting about how much information it’s being expected to retain.
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It’s funny cause while doing Clematis & Convolvulaceae of Europe, I noticed obs from Danmark kept showing up, and wondered if they had a lack of local identificators or something. When looking at the RG to verifiable map, the whole country is definitely greener than Germany just under it, so must be a thing at a larger scale with this country. I wounder what could cause this.
Calystegia obs in Europe (and particulary Danmark for some reason) are still quite a mess - 10 500 obs left to finish cleaning, some are well IDed but a lot need to be corrected or pushed back to genus. To spice up things I started to incorporate a “Unknown + Plantae from Reign to Sub-Class” in my ID routine to see if I can help a bit. So far a lot of my ID have been “Plantae to Dicots” but there is a few I could bring back to order or lower, and a few is better than nothing I guess ?
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Denmark seems to have a lack of local IDers compared to some neighboring countries like Germany. I think one reason may be that Denmark has a national platform for recording citizen science observations (naturbasen.dk), and one European competitor of iNat (observation.org) is also based in Denmark, so local experts may be active on one one of those sites rather than on iNat.
There was also a very prolific plant IDer who deleted their account last year, which resulted in a lot of lost IDs, including a large number in Denmark. Although this would not account for wrong IDs (presumably many observers would have responded to a correction, even if the ID is no longer present).
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That’s very interesting, it could explain it ! Thank you :)
If they provided some correction, they were the only person who interacted with those obs, but I strongly suspect a kind of CV loop that feeded itself without any identifier to correct it.
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Denmark has come up as a hotspot for unknowns in ID discussions before so there definitely seems to be something going on with that locally.
I believe there was also a huge school-based outreach program in Denmark at one point - likely a source of unknowns as well.
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2 months spent (dec-jan) to populate the “Phylogenetic Projects for ‘unknown’ observations” with 294,640 more observations without ID, appeared over the last 10 months (apr-jan).
There are currently 1,256,385 observations in these projects.
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I really appreciate your work on these projects!
I’m sorry I’m late answering! new phone, wrong alert settings.
https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/genus/artemisia/ is the GoBotany key
The biggest task by volume is correcting Artemisia indica misidentifications. ‘Mugwort’ is the iNat English common name of that species, which doesn’t occur here in the Northeast according to recent statements from botanists knowledgeable of the area. If you can learn Artemisia vulgaris, versus not-Artemisia vulgaris, or can find observations labeled Artemisia indica in the Northeast, and confirm they look like Artemisia vulgaris, or at least enter a genus ID on them…that would be a possible place to start helping while learning more to ID. I think we may have enough people to do the expert piece, but maybe not enough doing the vulgaris-not vulgaris that I’ve been doing.
I’m sure someone has some better ideas. Any thoughts? Any naming strategies that people have used before without causing more problems?
Patti
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If you see any IDs of Artemisia vulgaris in California, you can probably correct them to A. douglasiana with high confidence. We shouldn’t have any actual vulgaris as far as I know.
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Just finished working my way through all Angiosperm obs stuck at Phylum level in the Netherlands. Planning to move on to the dicot-pit next and run into half of those angiosperms again.
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The update motivated me to have a look at the Neottieae. At least, I could recognize many Epipactis leaves, even if I’m not familiar with the North American species.
But somebody or somebodies (can’t see who) voted many of them to casual by voting not wild even though they clearly were wild (but perhaps in a meadow or a garden). Have you all seen this behavior somewhere else, too?
I voted against for wild so they are back in the needs ID queue but now I am wondering…
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Oh, yes. I’ve done this myself, at times. It’s because either I don’t know that the species grows wild in the area or I misinterpret the location as a garden. I hope observers or other identifiers will comment so I can correct my error.
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when I come across these I type the comment taxon into the as suggested ID if it’s an unknown. Is this considered rude/should I stop doing it? Maybe enter the genus, but not the species?
I’m doing the same with observations ith photos that include ID tags from an event, but no notes or suggested id.
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Some of these seem to be mine. Thanks!
If I add ‘their’ ID - I leave a comment
placeholder
or
in the comment above
Then I withdraw my ID as soon another comes in. Mine is not going to be the second to take it to RG.
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