Hello! Would it be a good idea, when posting observations, to include comments on local lore about the species being observed?
The reason I bring this up is that I believe local lore can be a clue to IDng. For example, I may not know the scientific name of a plant nor the English common name, but I may know its common name in my native language and that it’s edible for humans, for example, or it has medicinal uses in my place. Someone else in the iNat community who may know these and, in addition, know the scientific name of the plant and the English common name would then be able to point me to this information.
I would say absolutely yes on the native language part.
I would strongly caution against noting that it is edible or has medicinal uses. That’s not what iNat is for really, but more importantly, people can easily see what you said and then go out without further research and then blame you or iNat for harm they caused themselves. I hate to be that person, but yeah.
Whenever someone posts a photo of a mushroom (usually) and asks “is it edible” I always respond that iNat isn’t for that.
Anyway - it’s a good question you ask, but yeah - people are gonna people, and as you say, a wrong ID could be very bad also. There are a lot of lookalike plants and mushrooms.
Allow me to be the devil on your shoulder… I am always interested to read “local lore” types of notes, both when IDing and when browsing observations to learn what grows/lives in a location. iNaturalist about documenting our interactions with the natural world, and I think it’s ok to interpret that broadly.
It’s worth being careful about phrasing (probably you don’t want to encourage anyone to try eating something they might not be able to ID safely), but if a plant has a local use, that’s valuable cultural and scientific knowledge that is not always accessible online. For example, the Wikipedia plants project (a collective effort to curate articles on plants) explicitly encourages adding a section on each species’ uses by humans, when that information is available.
If your native language is available as a list of common names in iNat, you can type the common name when identifying and get the scientific name, or if it hasn’t been entered, enter it on the taxon page. However, iNat searches all languages. One species of Odocoileus is called “venado bura” in Spanish. But if I type “bura” when I see a deer, two species come up, the other being called “bura” in some Panamanian language. There have also been pigs misidentified as magpies, or vice versa, because “pig” is Breton for “magpie”.
This is different from the language interface. If you have the Spanish common names enabled, you see “matacacatas” as the name for a kind of spider wasp. If the interface is in Spanish, you see “fulano añadió una identificación a una observación de mengano”.
I don’t agree with that statement - I see the concern, but I think that’s too restrictive. iNaturalist observations can absolutely (and in my opinion should because that is very interesting!) include culturally relevant notes like traditional uses (edible/medicinal), because that context can help others learn, identify and improve interaction with nature for observers and identifiers, which is exactly the point of iNat. This knowledge is also captured in that way. I guess it is better to phrase it responsibly, like “reported locally as edible/medicinal”. I think the benefits outweigh the risks by far!
Makes absolute sense not to state such things as fact, indeed, but I see no problem with statements like “a tea made with the leaves is commonly believed by locals to have anti-inflammatory properties” or “according to our local guide, the berries are edible” some such wording. The information could certainly be useful to researchers, even if such information is not the primary purpose of iNat.
That said, I don’t feel the notes section of an observation is a place to be writing a whole essay. If you have more than a few sentences of information to share, then I would consider whether a journal post might not be a more appropriate outlet for it.
Is this you ? Might you consider - adding a picture - nature or a drawing (something for us to recognise) - and some where and what for your iNat interests (again not intruding on your privacy - but a country or region ?)
You may also want to add something in your native language. There are some profiles in Spanish, and I recently added several languages to mine. If you observe a carabao, someone may want to comment in Cebuano, even though a carabao is not a cebú
Personally, I find the whole topic of how species influence culture (both in terms of practical uses and culture/mythology) very interesting, so I would love it. But I agree with others to be cautious about providing commentary that might encourage someone to ingest a potentially harmful plant or mushroom.
I think it would be fine if you add a disclaimer and stuff, but I get that that may be annoying and “unaesthetic”, and it will probably still not satisfy some people.
While the information you mention is valuable, its greatest value is in the About section, not in the comments on an individual observation. To add information in the About section, you need to be able to cite an authoritative source—in other words, a document others can (theoretically) find and review themselves. If you cannot provide such sources right away, you could start by creating a journal post. An important advantage of this approach is that all the discussion of the legitimacy or accuracy of the information will occur in one place. There won’t be a half-baked argument leading to a skewed conclusion in one observation and a thorough discussion leading to a balanced and more accurate perspective in another. In fact, in responding to your post others might be able to provide sources you hadn’t known about.
