Some kinds of plants are difficult to identify from a handful of pictures, particularly for those of us who have difficulty using keys and do not have a strong grasp of botanical terminology. Grasses are on my mind in particular. I’ve noticed that some grasses change color in the fall and my hope is that this might help identify the species.
My question is whether it would be useful to photograph an individual plant over a long period of time. Would a sequence of photos of an individual plant be useful to botanists and others?
Obviously for this to work, I’d have to make the location in some way so I could always find my plant. And I would need to be able to mark my initial observation so that I could add other observations afterwards.
I’ve was doing this with some local native Iris. I was linking all the pictures to the main photo of the flowers in full bloom (for ID purposes). I really need to link them all together to show progress over the course of the seasons (from early leaflets through seed pods).
Great idea.
A bit relatedly, there are some trees in public places that have been observed over and over for years. Maybe not a lot of botanical data to be gleaned from that but you never know. Here is a certain Betula lenta near Cornell University: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?lat=42.45097985911307&lng=-76.47733776569247&radius=0.022063832407434078&subview=map&taxon_id=49157&verifiable=any
Welcome to the forum, @ameadow ! :)
re: grasses There is currently a profile of a prolific grasses identifier that has some tips for grass observations that might be helpful.
I often link observations over time using “similar observation set”, which you can read more about here, but know others use “same specimen over time” when they are 100% sure they are photographing the exact same plant (might be harder with grasses, unsure).
Thanks very much for the references to other posts related to this. I will check them out and photograph accordingly!
Thanks! I live in New Mexico and many grass individuals are distinct because of the climate here. I will have a look at your post!
In a word, yes. Phenology data aside, individual trees and observations can vary widely, sometimes more than one observation is needed to ID a tree (I’m thinking of Quercus hybrids in particular), and there also have been cases of trees seemingly varying in leaf type wildly from year to year.
All that variability and information is important to understanding how individual trees vary from year to year, how much phenotypic plasticity they have, and in many cases, helps to ID more the specimen more accurately over time.
It can also help confirm IDs at various leaf stages (and life stages over the long-term) and improve the CV “understanding” of a species at these various levels, especially for annuals that can be otherwise difficult to impossible to ID from old flowering and dead stages (thinking of Pseudognaphalium among many others here).
Thanks for your reply. I would like to do this with a handful of my plant friends. I will go through some of the links others have listed and make sure I know how to do this in a way that will be useful for others.
I created a project for those type of repeated operations.
You may join and use it or do something similar.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/time-series
Great idea! Joined to add oak observations, especially tricky hybrids that have been observed many times, but don’t always look (or get photographed) the same from year to year.