I have been working to clean up spurious observations of J. horizontalis and I happened to peruse the photos on https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47573-Juniperus-horizontalis
I found photos clearly of J. communis and of J. virginiana reported to be examples of J. horizontalis.
What gives with that? Some were not research grade and some were erroneously labeled as research grade.
The point I guess I mean to get to, is how do photos get chosen for a taxon page. How is it that J. communis is shown as an example of J. horizontalis (or whatever).
Some of the replys I see sound like they think Iām just talking about observations - I mean the reference taxon page.
[what should I call that? e.g., https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47573-Juniperus-horizontalis
Mis-identified junipers, as youāve found out, are unfortunately very common. Iām not sure why you are surprised. Iām not overly familiar with the low stature species you recited; how good is iNaturalistās Computer Vision normally at distinguishing those two? This may a be a CV training issue or it may be the inexperience of users. From my own experience, Iām surprised to see J. virginiana at all confusable with the other two unless the examples were low-growing, heavily browsed, mown over, or somehow otherwise bonsaied!
If theyāre observations, you can add a disagreeing ID saying what they are. If theyāre one of the āfeaturedā taxon photos, then click āCurationā on the taxon page and Edit Photos. Then you can remove and add photos to make sure the ones on the taxon page are correct.
Lots of the original taxon pictures were imported from Flickr. And I have since learnt, some are valid, from iNatters and could be uploaded as āfrom this obsā. When I started the default to choose taxon pictures was from obs. We got that default changed to RG (which is what I took for granted, till I realised otherwise). You can also find the right picture, then choose that obs number, instead of scrolling around the world to find it. Since we cannot sort the pictures.
And there is a residue of obs with pictures of multiple sp, but IDed as the first one unfortunately. In among This daisy are roses and lilies and My Dog.
If you would like to select correctly identified photos to replace incorrectly IDed ones, you can click on āCurationā and then on āEdit photos,ā you should be able to add correctly identified photos using the Guidelines for Choosing Taxon Photos.
NB: I updated the title of the thread to make it clear that the issue was incorrectly IDed photos.
Thanks for the identification work you do on iNat, it helps to make the data more reliable and provide a better experience for everyone!
Iām not talking about mis-IDed observations, I mean on the reference page for that taxon.
e.g., https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47573-Juniperus-horizontalis