Annotations just changed (unless I’m going crazy?)
EDIT: Update was announced 2 minutes after this post : https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/updates-to-plant-annotations/52572
Hah, I got sidetracked on a current annotation project, and so I still need to rack up way more CV assist id’s before ready. Maybe another August fun event lol?
Edit: I added a link for my project above, but I need a better screencap extension than the .webm generating one I just tried… edit2, converted to mp4 for link, gives view?
page1 page2 page3 out of about 17 ;)
edit 6/24, a related work in progress luckily has a more accessible way to view for iNatters, instead of depending on my personal Reviewed state on some pages heh
I took it into my head to go through (and annotate) old Rubus laciniatus observations. I know this as Evergreen Blackberry; so I should have known what I was getting into when I started with the oldest purported one and saw that it was bare, leafless canes. People seem to apply this ID almost at random to any Rubus. The less laciniate the leaves, the better, apparently – I saw Section Rubus specimens with perfectly round leaflets identified incongruously as “cutleaf blackberry.”
Anyway, the ones that I didn’t have to bump back should give a pretty robust phenological dataset. Evergreen Blackberry is a fitting name considering how many are observed in December, January, and February, all annotated “Green Leaves.”
sometimes i pick a random place in the world and try to identify stuff there just as a challenge, but usually i find that i don’t recognize much at a low level, except for common invasives. so i wondered if there was a better way to find places that i’d be able to be reasonably effective at identifying to a low level?
i’m one of those folks who has learned plants and animals mostly through informal observation, and most of the stuff i can identify i can identify because i’ve observed them. since i’ve observed a lot of stuff my home area (Houston), i’m fairly comfortable identifying plants, birds, and insects here.
but where else are there high numbers of observations of species i’ve observed before? (those would probably be good places for me to try identifying things to a low level.)
for plants, it looks like i could probably be reasonably effective identifying as far east as Baton Rouge, and be somewhat effecitve identifying north to Dallas. looks like if i wanted to naturally extend my identification range, i should work my way up the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to Memphis, or go north from Dallas to Tulsa.
it looks like insects follow pretty much the same geographic pattern as plants.
for birds, it looks like i might have a decent shot at identifying in most of the US east of the 100th Meridian West.
…
interestingly, i think these maps also show where i could go visit if i wanted to find species i’ve never observed before.
You might want to try IDing stuff in this collection project I made: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/south-central-us-ecoregions
It covers this area
How fun, thanks for sharing! I couldn’t help but notice the strong overlap of my plant observations in the eastern US with Europe, which seems to be entirely lacking for my insect observations. Is anyone else seeing this type of pattern? And I’m afraid I’m not going to be of much help with ID’ing stuff in the southern hemisphere.
I’m in the Mediterranean climate of California, but there’s less overlap with the actual Mediterranean than I expected. Funny since it feels like all our weeds are from there!
California has quite a few weeds from South Africa, too. You might be able to help with the Southern Hemisphere.
I’d like to communicate with somebody who knows grasses of Bolivia or who knows Sand Cats-tail (Phleum arenaria) well enough to maybe know if an observation is NOT that species. No real need to know what the grass actually is; I just think that the observation labeled as this is WAY out of range and I’d like to get it out of the way. Unfortunately, I don’t really know Phleum arenaria.
If you would like help, please message me and I’ll send the link. Or just search for that species in Bolivia. There’s only the one record. (I’m trying to comply with the requirement not to post links to errors on the Forum.)
I’m an agrostologist currently working in Bolivia. I’ll be at the La Paz herbarium on Monday and the Santa Cruz herbarium next week. I’ll check in and see if they have any collections of this species - I doubt it!
Unfortunately, I’m no expert in Phleum (I primarily work with Guadua and some other Neotropical woody bamboos), but I’ll show this pic to my colleagues when I can.
Thank you, @elka_bamboo !
100 pages down, 400 more to go.
I am mainly working in India at the moment, as most of those needs IDs are from there anyways and recently got help from our most active spider IDer and now it is going really smoothly and we can even put some observations out of needs ID alltogether🤗
Is this a heat map of your IDs? How do I make one for myself?
No, as I understand it, it shows overlaps in your observations with other regions in the world… eg, which plants might also occur somewhere alse, so you could help IDing there
Heatmaps you can do here
ID
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/map?ident_user_id=ajott#2/-1.375/-58.357
Observations
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/map?user_id=ajott#2/0/0
(Change my username to yours in the link)
that’s not quite right. it shows, in sort of a gridded view, the proportion of observations of species you’ve never observed before vs all observations. the original post describing this is: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identifriday-is-the-happiest-day-of-the-week/26908/1631
Thank you!
Today feels like Friday in the US of A. Tomorrow is fireworks day and actual Friday is a day off for most people at my company. I was reviewing a few high level observations/disagreements after lunch and I’m less than 100 from 90K total IDs in New Mexico. It appears that I’m on track to reach my goal of 100K by end of year.
Edit: New Mexico has reached 1 Million total observations! 928K are in the verifiable category.