Make computer vision include hybrid taxa on an opt-in basis

[spiphany]

There was this post by staff from March last year; I don’t know what has happened since:

@alex

We’re got this identified as an important upcoming experiment and I’ll let you know when we have some results.

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Inclusion of selected hybrid taxon on an opt-in basis would be an improvement, but I agree with this:

@wildskyflower

we should just go ahead and re-enable CV for all hybrids in kingdom plantae/phylum tracheophyta, at least.

I suspect the simplest solution would be just including plant hybrids and excluding birds if those are the ones that are causing issues.

I’m going to quote myself about one important issue with not including hybrid plants in the CV:

@spiphany

One issue I encounter is with hybrid cultivars that look very different from other species in the genus; some of them also self-seed fairly readily, so observations of wild/feral specimens are not uncommon – it isn’t just a question of exclusively non-wild garden plants not being recognized. A couple that come to mind here are Erysimum x cheiri and some varieties of Viola x wittrockania / Viola x willamsii. Because the flowers are so distinct from the wild forms, the CV typically fails to recognize their affinity with other species in the genus and the suggestions it provides are often not even in the correct family.

A really common wild hybrid around here is Medicago x varia – I probably see it more than the “pure” Medicago sativa. Here the CV generally does suggest the right genus, but it is frustrating to have to enter and/or correct the taxon name all the time when it should be able to suggest it, since certain forms of this hybrid have fairly distinctive multi-colored flowers (also: from a data entry perspective, I find that I have to type the name in a very specific way to get it to show up in the drop-down list of possibilities, so I waste time simply trying to get the taxon I want).