Plant Phenology–Leaf bud break/Leaf drop
I have been working more on annotating phenology on my observation and others that I come across, and remembered that early on I noticed there wasn’t an option for leaf bud break (first leaves) or leaf drop (seasonal leaf drop).
I looked through some of the forum annotation requests and it seemed they were all related to flowering or life stage that I could see, but indicating whether plants are out of leaf or coming into leaf would be a valuable phenological note to have as climate changes and extends the leafing period of many plants that are seasonally deciduous.
One touched on leaf phenology, but wasn’t a specific request for an annotation feature. I couldn’t look thorough all of the requests however, so apologies if this has been requested before, though I would like a reference to the appropriate forums if this has already been requested and rejected.
Forum requests I looked at:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/plant-phenology-annotation-for-tree-leaf-out-breaking-buds/10009/4
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/plant-phenology-annotation-values/11804/40
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/use-computer-vision-to-annotate-observations/3331/42
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/using-identify-to-annotate-observations/1417
Judging leaf break and drop (and possibly ‘in leaf’) could be a somewhat subjective annotation, though on a forum with such a large user base and levels of expertise or type of training, there will always be some level of subjectivity. Are there any reasons this would not be practical to implement?