I agree. Nests and feathers seem especially conspicuous by their absence. Having projects devoted to this seems like an awkward workaround in place of an obvious solution.
2 Likes
But we have feathers.
No nests yet.
3 Likes
[facepalm] yes, of course, youâre right. Blanked on that.
Nests are what originally led me to this thread.
3 Likes
I want the things on conifers - I keep trying to click âfruitâ. Good clear pictures, useful info, but we canât annotate.
4 Likes
Some of those can be consolidated. No reason to have nest, den, burrow, & web be seperate.
2 Likes
Yesss. What Iâd like to see is something like âconstructionâ which includes also beaver dams, wild beehives etc., essentially the stuff described in âThe extended phenotypeâ.
And once we are at it: Iâd love to see endopterygota as an ID. I sometimes find things that might be caterpillars or beetle grubs, but I canât mark them as larvae because Insecta only has juveniles. I understand that this requires hard-to-implement changes in the database, so it is not going to happen soon.
3 Likes
it is still driving me nuts that I canât annotate the fragments, there are so many of them!
I would love it if someone would explain why it isnât worth it. A lot of people voted against it.
1 Like
fruiting phenology
- Immature
- Mature/Ripening
- Dehiscing or seed being dispersed
- Old/dehisced fruit only
theres a observation field tag for these but i think it would be good to be added into the phenology graphs
I am a somewhat recent user to iNaturalist and have been exploring getting more information into the observations I have been making. I noticed that under annotations for sex of the organism, only male and female are options (or cannot be determined). I was wondering how easy this would be to change for plant species since these terms really donât apply to them.
Perfect, monoecious, dioecious, pistilate, and staminate would be more appropriate. There are other terms as well, and ones that donât apply to angiosprerms, but thereâs like over a dozen and I donât know if that much would bog the system down too much. Thought this might be a good starting point.
3 Likes
Hi, welcome to the forums! I know a lot less than you. I am finding a lot of information, however it is slightly more advanced than my base of knowledge. Can you recommend a resource for a beginner to maybe begin to understand the terms you think more appropriate?
The only plantâs gender I have been able to suss out is when papaya trees pop up here, it becomes clear once they begin to flower if they are male, female or hermaphroditic. But even then I have had a male spontaneously turn to female, is that one of those terms? (I think females can also spontaneously become male, too â it just has not happened in my little garden.)
Ah, thatâd be sex yâall are talking about. Gender is things like âmanâ, âwomanâ, and ânonbinaryâ, and isnât something that plants have.
It might be a good idea to loop in a few of the more common plant sexes, and maybe also have an âotherâ category as well.
3 Likes
Welcome to the forum! I moved your post to this existing topic, where there are a number of posts about plant annotations already.
1 Like
(Sorry to have used the wrong overall term as well. The original thread was titled plant gender or some such, so I wasnât sure which term to use, to be honest.)
1 Like
This comes up with certain regularity. From previous discussions, my interpretation is that there is resistance to adding things like monoecious and dioecious to the sex annotation because those terms usually describe a sexual system on a species level and thus would be more appropriate info for species pages. By contrast, annotations are supposed to be used on an individual level on observation pages. E.g. a plant species can be dioecious with the individual being observed either male or female. The confusing thing then is that only very few plant species are dioecious and for a lot of others the male/female dichotomy just does not apply.
Whatâs missing in my opinion is an annotation of bisexual/hermaphrodite or maybe simply âotherâ for sex. Using âcannot be determinedâ seems wrong if it is possible to determine that the individual plant in the observation is bisexual/hermaphroditic.
Botanical terminology like perfect, imperfect, staminate, and pistillate describe flower morphology and apply to individual flowers, but not necessarily the sex of the individual. E.g. a monoecious individual can have both staminate (male) and pistillate (female) flowers or ovulate cones making the individual a hermaphrodite. If annotations are supposed to apply to the individual, rather than a single flower being observed, then it would be tough to incorporate this level of detail.
5 Likes
Agree. Apart from the huge variety of possible combinations that are possible in the world of plants (plants that change sexes, plants with both unisexual and bisexual flowers, etc.), including monoecious etc. would seem more like a botanical fact that could be looked up for any given species rather than recording the characteristics of the individual in an observation.
It seems to me that the âsexâ annotation for plants also inherently overlaps with the phenology annotations (i.e., a sex annotation is only relevant for most plants when they are flowering/fruiting). So I wonder whether it would make sense to eliminate the âsexâ field for plants entirely and instead add an additional set of annotations (multiple selections possible) that could be used on plant observations marked as âfloweringâ, e.g.:
male flowers
female flowers
perfect flowers
inflorescence with bulbils
âŠand something to recognize the reproductive morphology of conifers seems like it would be useful, too.
1 Like
We need the male and female annotation for a handful of our fynbos species - Leucadendron, restios, Clutia. But the option to annotate should only be available for relevant taxa.
And an explanation to avoid newbies applying that gender police query to themselves.
Thatâs how it is handled for fungi - there is no sex annotation available for those. Iâm guessing this is difficult to implement for plants where there is so much more variation. There is variation within genera. E.g. Thalictum dioicum, as the name suggests, comes in male and female plants and uses wind-pollination, while Thalictrum thalictroides has bisexual flowers that attract pollinators.
There can be variation within species and even individuals, like maples which can be either dioecious or monoecious, and if dioecious can change sex from year to year. I have two maple trees in my yard that didnât produce seeds when I moved in but they do now. The one next to my driveway is loaded with seeds this year, but a decade ago only had male flowers. So Iâve seen this switch from male to bisexual or female reproductive mode right outside my door. Iâm not sure how I would annotate those - âvariableâ seems like the best fit for these two individuals. If annotations go with specific observations including date and time, they would be âmaleâ one year and âfemaleâ another year.
2 Likes
The best reference I have for plant terms overall is
Plant Identification Terminology: An Illustrated Glossary by James G. Harris and Melinda Woolf Harris.
With respect to flowers and your papaya tree (and I have no direct experience with this species so I am only basing this off an initial search), when I look this species up the description indicates it is monoecious, so it would produce both staminate and pistilate flowers. Itâs possible this species produces staminate flowers first, then afterwards the pistilate flowers form, making it appear as though it is shifting genders. The same could occur in the reverse order, although that would make it difficult to fertilize if the pistil formed first and then withered before the stamens/pollen formed.
2 Likes
Interesting idea. Maybe:
Perfect flowers only
Staminate flowers only
Pistilate flowers only
Staminate and pistilate flowers
Staminate and perfect flowers
Pistilate and perfect flowers
This could cover the majority of gender for individuals of flowering plants one could see
There are papaya trees with both blossoms at the same time. This is the hermaphroditic sex that grows both male and female blooms together and so can self pollinate.
But there are also trees that have only male sex or have only female blooms. Then at some point, these may change sex. I found documentation of this, beyond my own eyes, quite easily, however I searched in Spanish. That said, this quote appears to reference a study in English:
El cambio de sexo en la papaya ha sido también reportado como respuesta a estrés ambiental, como el daño mecånico y cambios bruscos de temperatura (Iorns, 1908; Lange, 1961).
My papaya likely keep popping up (there is another, now, in the side passage) from the bats that swoop over the garden at night, but clearly they are not the only trees that change sex. @DianaStuder referenced another tree that did the same thing. Is there a term / annotation for this?