According to Missouri Botanical Garden, “Fruits are not berries, but are single-seeded achenes which are inedible, hence the common name of barren strawberry.” Technically, any seed or seed-bearing structure of an angiosperm is considered a fruit.
What about ferns?
The new “leaves” annotations do not say anything about fiddleheads and how those should be handled; I think that breaking leaf buds should apply only to leaf buds breaking the rhizome, and thus for easier understanding fiddleheads should be considered.
Also, sori, spores, or something about reproduction should be added for the sporophyte IMO. The same could be said about gametophytes, but there are fewer observations for those.
Presently conifer annotations include only “Leaves” and “Sex” in the “Attributes” column. It is my understanding that additional attributes may be added in 2025. I have been unable to find where these possible additions are being discussed? Does anyone know??
This is the main thread for discussing ideas for annotations. I’m unaware of a specific/official thread for conifer annotations.
From the recent post about the latest additions for plant annotations:
I have been trying to add annotations but find there are far too many places where I can not.
For example the entire fungi / lichen area seems to be ignored.
The entire bryophytes seem to be ignored.
For trees there is no way to add anything on barks or cones.
You may use observation fields for that and even define your own.
+1. I find that “Annotations” are most useful when they can be applied to the entire taxa that they are associated with. There isn’t a group for example that would include all “trees”, or shrubs that would have some sort of a bark.
Observation fields are a really good fit for this, the downside being that you need to extract and plot any data from them yourself, as far as I’m aware there is no built-in solution to display a timeline or graph that includes observation fields, like the one for annotations.
I’m not for or against a “fragment” or “segment” (for arthropods) annotation, but I think “wing” should be added as it’s own annotation regardless. A lot of pterygota can be IDd to family from wing veins, but it takes an amount of effort to study each individual observation. I think it’s rare that something like a Dragonfly wing gets to research grade, even though it should be able to most of the time. I think it’s because people who are looking to identify Dragonflies are looking for bodies and don’t want to deal with studying veins, and people who want to identify Dragonfly wings know they’re going to get buried under other observations of Dragonflies, even if they sort by 'Dead" or “cannot be determined.” I think having “wing” as it’s own annotation for pterygota will help get a lot of insects out of “needs ID” limbo, whether they can be put as casual grade or bumped to research grade
There can never be enough annotations for every use case. If there ever gets to be, someone will quickly come up with new use cases.
In that case, we might as well close this thread. While we’re at it, I suppose we could just get rid of annotations altogether.
I understand the purpose of this thread to be to allow users to discuss what annotations they would like to see as part of a process of determining what needs exist and whether or not it would be feasible to implement them.
I agree that having annotations for everything conceivable does not make sense, because at some point the sheer number of options becomes impractical. Some suggestions may be too niche to be useful. But rather than blanket dismissing suggestions or people’s concerns about lack of annotations for certain taxa/phenomena, it seems to me that it would be more productive to discuss why you think a suggested annotation will not add significant value. In the process of discussion, it may transpire that the need could be met in some other way by a differently formulated annotation, or by some other solution such as observation fields, or that making certain types of distinctions will not add any useful information. But this will not happen unless the suggestion is actually looked at and assessed.
That was what I was trying to say, too. For context, the comment that I was replying to said,
There were no suggestions as to what annotations would be useful for these taxa.
For fungi, for by far the majority of non-pathogenic taxa, both “Evidence of presence” and reproductive stage will be the fruiting body. Is there a good reason to add this as an annotation, especially considering that observations of mycelium alone will probably be unidentifiable? Keep in mind, too that @tiwane, the staff member who started this thread and laid out its parameters, initially said,
Similarly, what annotations could there be for bryophytes, other than the presence or absence of sporophytes?
As to the conifers, that has been discussed: presence of pollen cones or seed cones would be useful.
As to barks, what annotations would be useful there? Annotations refer to things such as phenology, sex, or evidence of presence. A tree’s bark does not change with its phenology or sex, and would be considered “organism” for evidence of presence. Specifying such characteristics as papery, shreddy, flaking, etc. would be species-specific and therefore add little or no information once the tree was identified.
In this case, there were no suggested annotations; just a general statement that certain types of taxa had none. Out of that comment, though, I can agree – along with various other people – that reproductive phenology of conifers can be as useful as that of angiosperms.
I wish to highlight one in particular.
evidence | Bacteria, Viruses, Fungi | add symptom | taxon list needs refinement?
One potential problem with this, given the premise that annotations should add value beyond that of the taxon identification, is whether that premise is compatible with this case. At present, the only annotation I find for Bacteria is “Evidence: Gall.” This raises a question: would an observation of a gall-forming taxon have any other evidence? Would identifying the organism as a gall-forming taxon not imply “gall”?
Perhaps the annotation was added for the opposite reason – the taxon has not been identified, and is annotated as “gall” to help sort it out from the mass of equally unidentified, non-gall-forming taxa? If this is the case, it suggests another possibly useful annotation.
bacteria (Kingdom Bacteria) from Greenville, NC, USA on August 31, 2024. These bacteria gave off hydrogen sulfide gas.
This is a visible biofilm. Given that the identification currently stands at the Kingdom level, annotating it with “Evidence: Biofilm” would seem to have the same usefulness as the “gall” annotation, that is, enabling it to be sorted out from equally identified, non-biofilm-forming taxa. Similarly, if the taxon was identified, “biofilm” and “gall” would then be equally redundant, adding no information not already known from the ID – unless there were also micrographs of bacteria isolated from galls or biofilms.
Any thoughts on this in the context of the stated issue, “Taxon list needs refinement?”
these suggestions were originally submitted through the feature request category but were not approve and resubmitting these through here, did not edit them through and will add in other edits or changes in the reply of this comment
This feature request is for the website since annotations are only accessible on the website. However, annotations would be great for the app but that is less of importance here.
For plants, annotations include flowers or fruits, leaves, or none of the above. In addition to these annotations, the seeds need to be included in the annotations. Not only to show the seeds are present but if they are fresh or fully dried and ready for disposal. For marking if seeds are present such as we can already do for flowers, fruits, and leaves; the annotation needs to be included there as well. For the drop-down section of the seed annotation, there should be two options named fresh (for green and not mature seeds) and ready (for dried and mature seeds that are ready to be dispersed). In addition to the new annotation request, I would also like to request updated annotation updates for plants as well. For the annotation of flowers and fruits, flowers and fruits should be in their own separate annotation. For flowers annotations, the drop-down options should have one or more options to add such as for the colors of the leaf’s annotation, but the flowers should have fresh, mature, senior, and dead. Fresh means flowers are young and/or budding, mature mean the flowers are at their peak performance, senior means flowers are nearing their end, and dead means the flowers are done and brown. There should also be a plant, leaf, and flower size annotation where small, medium, and large drop-down options depend on the plant. These additional changes to the plant’s annotations will be beneficial to record adaptations of the species over time.
Talking about the website since the annotations can only be edited and viewed on the website. Trees have a very limited section of limitations compared to other plants especially flowering and seeding plants. Trees only have leaves annotations while other plants have flowers, seeds or fruits, leaves, and sex. In the tree annotations, the addition of seeds or cone annotation would be beneficial. The drop-down tab would include no cones present, fresh cones (green cones), and mature cones (brown and loose cones). This annotation will support the evaluations of the spread of native and invasive species of trees and prevention as well as studying of the growth adaptations of tree species and more studies based on the seed process of cones.
Yes exactly! That I said in my comment as well but did not think of the bark. Can you explain more on the bark idea, such as what the annotation should look like?
I might repeat some ideas already mentioned but about the fungi annotations, the additions of the annotations of evidence of presence should also have spores, stem, and head. Spore prints should as be added in the annotations such as in the evidence of presence. The state of the mushroom or specimen should be added such as rooted up of the soil, still in soil, or broken in half (one half still in soil while the other is removed).
I assume you mean coniferous trees, since angiosperm trees have all the flowering plant annotations.
Yes I did
I noticed something about annotations recently. Once one adds an annotation it is still possible to thumbs up or thumbs down that same annotation. This means that a single person can annotate the same thing twice. So, my question is, what’s the actual purpose of being able to agree with your own annotation?