#IdentiFriday is the happiest day of the week

OK, now you’ve got me curious about Erigeron vernus on the US Coastal Plain. It normally blooms in early spring, but if the savanna is burned any time of year it will pop up and bloom like crazy. I guess I now have to go through and annotate it so I can check the phenology chart!

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OK I annotated 41 ident pages of Erigeron vernus, and it makes a great phenology chart! https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/162547-Erigeron-vernus. One big blooming peak in April, but another peak in July, and some blooming at every month of the year, an interesting contrast to your other Erigeron above, @annkatrinrose. We maybe should check and see if those July bloomers are actually E. vernus or maybe mis-identified, but it at least gives something to focus on. So many hypotheses generated by this kind of data!

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Very interesting, especially since phenology for Erigeron quercifolius, which shares much of the same range in the coastal plain, does not appear to look like that. Is that a true species difference, or maybe hinting at misidentifications? I’ve found a few out of range E. vernus IDs in the mountains and they turned out to be something else. It seems E. strigosus may be mistaken for this, and for fall bloomers Boltonia is a candidate to consider.

I double-checked the ID of the July bloomers. I pulled out a couple of probable Boltonia, but in nearly all the other cases the rubbery basal leaves could be seen. I think it’s a real pattern, and a likely adaptation to periodic burning.

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Very interesting, especially if it turns out to be unique to that species!

I have really only looked at the four common ones in my area but there are many more across the US, some very localized and even a few that are not yet on BONAP or iNat. There are likely quite a few that have found interesting niches within their local ecosystems.

If anyone wants to help with cleanup efforts, check out the individual taxon pages for “similar species” for ID conflicts. Currently listed ID overlaps are:
1319 E. annuus/strigosus
1215 E. philadelphicus/pulchellus
1042 E. philadelphicus/strigosus
945 E. annuus/philadelphicus
148 E. annuus/pulchellus
139 E. pulchellus/strigosus

I have probably contributed quite a few of them. :sweat_smile: Would appreciate corrections if I seem to have gotten things wrong. It was (and still is) a steep learning curve. I wonder if and how these may affect the phenology graphs once they get sorted out.

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1321 now. I used this resource to identify one of my own Erigeron observations, and shall be applying it to this set.

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I’m trying to tackle reviewing all the Clitoriinae peas in continental US minus peninsular Florida and southeast Georgia where there are additional species I don’t know how to differentiate. I’m also skipping the ones with no flowers. I’ve added about 600 IDs this weekend so far. I haven’t gotten tired of them yet like I did with yaupon and baldcypress because they are such beautiful flowers.

Edit: Done! I did 836 Clitoriinae IDs this weekend.
Edit 2: Went back and looked at the area of Georgia and Florida I skipped earlier and checked Centrosema vs Clitoria mis-IDs (and found things that were not Clitoriinae at all) while avoiding IDing to species except for non-native Clitoria ternatea which I can tell from the native ones. Total IDs for the weekend is now 888.

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I wish to report that about 65 dedicated and hard-working project members (plus an unknown number of other IDers who were not project members) can reduce the pile of plant Needs ID observations in New England and New York by 2.2% (or 34,766 observations) in 48 hours, in case anyone is looking for more identifying anecdata. By comparison, last weekend over the same time period - but without a concentrated effort - the Needs ID pile went down by 1,119.

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Hey, identifiers, you should know about the new way iNat wants us to deal with multi-species observations - read the details on this blog post: https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/90263

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Thanks for telling me; never would have known that little gem was in a blog post with a totally unrelated title.

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Same, I randomly clicked on an active thread and saw a major Life improvement!

Now this pile will be getting smaller. It’s nice that all these photosets will finally have a proper resting place togther in Casual.

edit- just found overlapping project

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I’ve been working on that project a little already. I’ll do more soon.

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Someone should add a thread to the “News and Updates” category. I think this is a really important addition and I also would not have known about it otherwise.

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If anyone wants another pile of them, this one isn’t great because it’s not in Identify, but it is very large.

edit: Loarie converted this into some Identify links over on the other thread (over 10,000 obs!)

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News and Updates is a monthly roundup.

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That’s very handy to know. I would never have thought to check the blog post for it either

Oh that make sense. my bad

I waded in to wrestle a bunch of them. Apropos the new DQA discussion, I may have been a tetch overzealous in a couple of cases, but I did my best to exercise restraint. It’s not as though we’re going to run out of links anytime soon.

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Friday!

A question: Do any of you worry about the state of identifications on iNat ten or twenty years from now? Here, I’m not talking about the perpetual dearth of identifiers, nor am I concerned about the finer points of how to apply a DQA annotation. I’m not even worried about lumping and splitting and name changes and all that taxonomic hoop-jumping. I’m worried because I see growth in a class of observations that aren’t easily identifiable.

I can best clarify this by an example, I hope: Very Competent and Experienced iNaturalist Jane, in the course of making a botanical survey of a conservation property, makes an observation of a common shrub that’s not in flower or fruit, a species that has rather ordinary leaves. (Those of you in eastern part of North American can envision something like Northern Spicebush or American Fly-Honeysuckle here.) Since Jane is very experienced and competent, she identifies it correctly when she uploads the photo to iNat. Very Competent and Experienced identifier John comes along the next day and thinks to himself, “I bet Jane’s correct, but without flowers/fruit/etc., I can’t be sure what this is. So I’ll just move on to the next observation.” Years go by, ten identifiers look at that observation, but none feel confident in agreeing with Jane’s ID. Also, none of them feel sure her ID is wrong, so they don’t post an ID of, say, Dicot.

Example #2: Ordinary observer posts a photo of a conifer taken from a distance and IDs it as Eastern White Pine (a very common conifer around my region). Or they post a photo of just the bark. Diligent identifiers think, “I’d really rather see a photo of a cone or the number of needles in a bundle. I don’t feel comfortable agreeing with it as Eastern White Pine; I’ll just move on.” They also aren’t confident the observer is wrong in calling it an Eastern White Pine.

Essentially, these observations are unidentifiable at the species level (or even genus), but they are also “too good” to end up as Casual. What do we do with such observations?

I suppose this worry of mine comes from my wanting to complete the task of identification, which I recognize is a foolish desire (to put it mildly), but I also wonder if the sheer number of these unidentifiable observations is daunting to would-be identifiers.

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For me personnally the question is: do we need to worry about completed IDs when we think about the general purpose of iNat (“iNaturalist provides a place to record and organize nature findings, meet other nature enthusiasts, and learn about the natural world” from the FAQ)?
So from my perspective as someone from both sides (many observations vs dipping my toe into the pool concerning IDs):
Yes, of course we all love to satisfy that urge to tidy (shiny RG! Advancing Science!Empty that Needs-ID queue!).
But does it really hurt that observation if it never gets that second confirmation to lift it to RG?
As someone coming from tech and data science, my faith is that on one side the AI and the methods themselves will grow and get better and better (ChatGPT for identifications!), freeing IDers up to (maybe) develop into experts in their small corner of nature.
But on the other hand, my faith is also into the community and those engaged IDers, which is proven everytime one of my lost fungi observations gets a further ID (even if they might never get to species, which is my fault since often I’m too lazy and pressed for time to get those needed key identifying features…) or somebody IDs an observation uploaded 5 or 10 years ago. IDing in iNat sometimes feels like an ant hill or bee stock to me: many many workers doing their thing - sometimes working in tandem and sometimes a lone worker coming your way (and observation).
The main thing is just having patience - and that has been rewarded often in my case!

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