Generally, yes, there are a lot of useful observation fields and other data that can be added to observations that help particular use cases or projects.
Since by far most plants are monoecious, it’s a small enough number of observations where sex is useful for plant observations that I don’t think it merits an annotation to be displayed at all times for all of Plantae.
This is possibly region or climate specific, but in the upper Midwest, I often find plants to be not actually completely dead or dormant aboveground, even though they seemed to be at first glance. And I’m looking at deadish and dormantish looking plants for a pretty big portion of the year. Determining whether an organism is “completely dormant or dead” is a task not possible based on most iNat photos of plants, and I definitely know that most of the photos that I’m uploading to iNat that “look dormant” do not contain detailed enough level of information to make that assessment. For example, a brown and crispy fruiting stem where all the cauline leaves have long since fell off, but peeking out from under the snow are the plant’s green basal leaves. Often I don’t take a photo of the green leaves but just the fruiting stem.
There are grey areas for almost all of the annotations, but the grey area is pretty big here. If you can confirm based on your photos and in-person observations that an organism is completely dead or dormant, that’s great and definitely continue your work/project because these tend to be some of the most useful photos on iNat to me.
But it sounds like you’re referring to and most interested in the compartmentalization of tissue and the appearance of different aboveground plant parts at different times of the year, which is, in most cases a different question to ask and answer than whether an entire plant is dead or dormant. Maybe it’s less useful for areas that have less severe growing seasons than mine, but I usually start by sorting by month if I want to view crispy or vegetative plants. Maybe the “vegetative, not flowering, or not possible to tell” option, which should be added to the flowering phenology one, would help with this use case.
Is there a list of plant taxa for which this would be useful? Happy either add only taxa for which it would be useful, or exclude taxa for which it’s not, whichever one is smaller. Are entire families dioecious, for example?
There is a list here, though it is definitely incomplete (e.g., none of the dioecious Crotons are included). Here is a list of all the species on iNaturalist that have used the sex annotation. This too is almost certainly incomplete despite the over 1,600 species using it. Euphorbiaceae is one of those families that has many dioecious members (mostly monoecious, but a fair number of dioecious species too). Ephedra and Baccharis are two very common dioecious genera that come to mind. There are also examples of functional dioecy (e.g., Echinocereus coccineus) where a sex annotation would be useful to have available.
@bouteloua over 12,000 plant observations currently use the sex annotation. I guess this is relatively small compared to the vast numbers on iNaturalist, but still sizable.
I appreciate your comments, and I do know what you’re talking about (plants in West Texas behave similarly unless you get so far south that the Annuals start to overwinter).
I still think it useful, but I guess it’s really not as important to me as a lot of other things like adding a sterile option (maybe even a leaf bud option?). So, I guess it would be better for me to drop the issue and move onto something else.
Ultimately, the ideal for me would be to try to implement life stage annotations for plants like there are for animals, but I realize there are difficulties. I occasionally produce sets of observations for plants that show seedlings to adulthood and frequently photograph identifiable rosettes (as do a lot of naturalists in my area, though many not so identifiable, much to my annoyance). I guess in my mind, the difficulties are perhaps no more complicated than the difficulties for Animals (think of insects and salamanders in comparison with mammals; Plantae and Animalia are both kingdoms after all), though perhaps more ecosystem controlled differences to add to the phylogenetically based differences.
I don’t know any fully monoecious families offhand, I’m sure someone could find a few, but like Nathan says there are mostly monoecious families with some dioecious exceptions. :\ Even still, there is the question as to whether the annotation is intended to refer to the whole plant, or just part of it, in which case you could have an observation of a monoecious species but have photos depict only male or only female flowers. I guess photo-level annotations would help solve that.
I only apply the sex annotation to dioecious plants as sex usually indicates the whole organism and not just part. It doesn’t really make sense to me to apply it to photos of organs. Looks like the three non-pinopsid lineages of gymnosperms are mostly or completely dioecious. Though, I don’t know about Gnetum and maybe there are a few Ephedra species that are monoecious (Wikipedia says “the plants are mostly dioecious”). All the cycads, Welwitschia, and Ginkgo are dioecious.
Perhaps I could make a wiki-style list (if I can figure out how) to start compiling dioecious species. The first step would be to go through the plants that use the sex annotation. Would that help?
Yes. I don’t really know how one would apply this to nonvascular plants.
Only in that it might be good to double check and see if the taxon which has that annotation is actually dioecious, and someone didn’t mistakenly add a sex annotation.
I don’t know much about plants, so I’m just trying to make sure I understand which taxa should have the annotation.
Euphorbiaceae and Phyllanthaceae both come pretty close. The latter might even be fully monoecious. If you exclude the dioecious members of Euphorbiaceae, I can’t really think of any species that have perfect flowers. The flowers are either staminate or pistillate.
The table is a bit odd, but the headings should be Family, Genus, Order, ?, ?, specifics of sexual system?, pollination, seed dispersal?, distribution.
Actually, here’s something better! Please see the supporting information file at this link. It’s the same database, but cleaned up and with headings. Thanks @twr61! @tiwane
Alive/dead could be useful.
‘Present at the moment’ field should probably be limited to animals. Things like toasted annual plants could be referred to as ‘dead’ instead.
I’d love to see something to track leaf phenology, which is really important for plants both in cold areas like Vermont and in areas with dry seasons such as coastal California. However, that gets tricky because evergreen versus deciduous is something that comes down to genus level - oaks for instance have many evergreen and many deciduous species, and offering the pulldown for evergreen species may just confuse people.
It would be neat to have an annotation to tag other species visible in a photo but that may be too confusing if you also have people copying the photos… could already be recorded
I think that baby/chick would be quite useful for a life stage option. As a bird that is no more than a few days old doesn’t really count as a juvenile, and neither do many other species of animals.