Those Haitian/Dominican anoles are a mess ever since the common bark anole was split.
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This article in the New York Times today makes clear why fungi ID on iNaturalist is so difficult: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/science/mushroom-hunters-dna.html
@lothlin, you’ll be interested in this, if you haven’t already seen it.
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Anoles are always so messy to identify 
Here’s a gift link to that New York Times article.
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Is it OK to put that link in my pre/retirement signature block? I just realized it’s the perfect pointer to my colleagues in answer to, “What will you do?” Conversation risks stalling at my typical, “Plan to study slime molds!” response. ;)
Edit: Nevermind, as a NYT subscriber I think I can generate my own gift link for that purpose.
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Looks like you generated your own, but using any gift link like that should be fine as well, for future reference.
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I think it’s really interesting. I haven’t seen your note yet, but maybe we can compare ideas and observations.
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
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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
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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.”
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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.
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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
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That’s a fun mapping tool to use. My plant map is essentially the range of western Penstemon observations
I focus heavily on recent and high level observations throughout New Mexico and there’s no shortage of IDs to make.
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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.
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that’s interesting. just looking at top species in New York vs UK, it looks like a lot of the top introduced plants species in New York are top natives in the UK. so i bet that’s the sort of thing that’s going on.
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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!
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California has quite a few weeds from South Africa, too. You might be able to help with the Southern Hemisphere.
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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.)
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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!
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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.
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