Your mission, should you choose to accept it.
NOW PLAYING August 1-31, 2023
at an identify modal (?) near you!
MISSION BRIEFING
In this challenge we’ll visit “Darkest” [1,2] Africa. Over the course of the month, we’ll find out whether identifiers can make a difference for plant observations on this ecological diverse continent.
How are we coordinating the operation?
- Flora of Africa is the collection project we’ll watch to monitor id progress over time. This contains all African Plantae currently identified from Tracheophyta onward.
- Mission Impossible - Identify Plantae in Africa is the challenge’s traditional project. Its journal will provide updates. Observations placed into the project may be notable for their examples, discussions, mentoring needs or other features.
- Mission Impossible - Identify Plantae in Africa is the present thread for freeform discussion, questions and general enthusiasm. Updates would be crosslinked here (so you don’t have to join the project to find updates.)
- iNat IDathon Discord server is also available during the challenge for id discussion (thanks to @astra_the_dragon and @arboretum_amy for the help there)
What online resources are already available to identify African plants?
- Flora of Africa’s first journal post has a rich collection of resources linked.
- Guide to plant families of southern Africa has keys, potential application to other parts of Africa, and author(s) who are iNatters. (pdf access)
Which links will we use to identify Plants?
The links below are presented in “identify modal” format, and contain certain elements that you can keep or remove as you like. Notable elements of these links:
- Flora of Africa project, for Tracheophyta and farther: &project_id=12505
- All of Africa: &place_id=97392
- Africa without the Cape region, excluding a “less dark,” higher observation count area: &place_id=97392¬_in_place=123067
- Random sort, an easy way to access observations that are not the “newest” or “oldest” 10K. Refresh page for a new set. It doesn’t give a page count while in use (if you care). Remove from url to see current page count: &order_by=random
- Observations per page, when set at 100 from default 30, allows quick estimate of progress outside of random sort (136 pages is about 13.6K observations): per_page=100
- Grace period exclusion of last 3 months’ new observations, optional to add to link if you want: &created_d2=2023-05-01&createdDateType=range
8/3 update: @koos_the_reader has presented a set of links with the grace period built in, in a post to this thread. Many thanks!
I will use the following links to watch progress. Use any of these directly, or make your own to “choose your own adventure” for the mission! (Observation counts in K shown below are from Day “t minus 1”, on 7/31.)
Mission: Add them! These observations are not yet in Flora of Africa. Getting any observation from these links to Tracheophyta or better will add them to the project:
- Plantae at Kingdom in Africa, 47.3K mostly Tracheophyta. NonCape, 39.2K.
- Unknowns in Africa, 21.1K mostly Tracheophyta. NonCape 15.2K.
- Phylogenetic projects for unknowns contain many African observations, and are pre-sorted with the help of CV. @jeanphilippeb 's comment: “Note that at rank Order, and at ranks below, each project has a link for identifying observation ‘in project and all sub-projects recursively.’ (in the project ‘About’ section).” Notable related projects include Trees 1 and Trees 2
- 8/8 update: related to those, the Tree ID project has been broadened to id trees from all regions for this challenge.
Mission: Improve them! These “slices” of observations are already in Flora of Africa:
- Phylum through Class, 58.3K. NonCape, 39.5K.
- Just Class Dicots (difficult or not), 29.6K. NonCape, 19.9K.
- Subclass through Subtribe at Needs ID, 105.5K. NonCape 53.9K.
- Genus through Complex at Needs ID, 338.4K. NonCape 139.4K.
- Species and farther at Needs ID, 410.5K. NonCape 204.5K.
Side Mission: Tend Captive Plants! These won’t go to Flora of Africa, but you can still be a hero in helping to sort these out.
- Unknowns marked captive in Africa, 10.7K mostly Tracheophyta. NonCape 4.5K.
- Plantae marked captive in Africa, 191.8K mostly Tracheophyta. NonCape, 82.9K.
Are there guidelines for identifiers?
- Etiquette - current best practices
- Limit notifications to others where you can.
- Your notifications through site: When you id a lot, you get a lot of feedback. Your unread notifications are the count icon in the upper right corner of any inaturalist.org page. If you click the icon, they are presented in sets of 200 as a dropdown. If you click directly on one item in the dropdown, the whole list may be cleared accidentally. Try “control click” (Windows) or other means to send each item to a new tab without affecting the dropdown. You can “turn off agreeing notifications” to limit the simplest ones, although you may then miss experts’ comments along with experts’ agreements.
- Your notifications through 3rd party: @pisum has provided a rich separate interface to replace the dropdown. Click through the authorizations to use it.
This example workflow provided by @dianastuder highlights other things to keep in mind (her posts below are linked)
- Languages
- Placeholder
- Missing Species
- Multiple Species
- Combine Multiple Obs
- @ mention
- Supporting ids
- Advising observer
- Narrowing your id “slice”
- Marking Reviewed, Follow/UnFollow
- Using Computer Vision
- Thank you for momentum!
[July contents of this post follow, left for context] That’s the teaser, the rest is just reduction to practice. ;) I’ve had an identification challenge in mind for a while, and now’s the time! We can use this thread both to work out the details first and then to communicate during the challenge.
My draft-stage thinking about the technical framework is to have 3 elements for it to happen
- a forum thread for communication (this one)
- an umbrella project that participants could use to id stuff - I guess that will come with a “leaderboard” built in? (7/31 update we’ll use Flora of Africa plus good links intel)
- a traditional project for hand-added stuff like example obs for training, obs with really good discussion or tips, obs where an identifier needs a mentor, etc [7/27 update- single project created]
For the umbrella project, it would exclude recent observations, going up only through May 1, 2023. I’m thinking it could contain all Plantae in Africa, plus whichever of @jeanphilippeb 's presorted Unknown projects that are focused on Africa. Most of that is Plantae too, right?
We could have it run throughout the month of August, and maybe compare the leaderboard 7/31 vs 8/31 if we want to see “winners.”
My thinking about the human framework has already been articulated by @dianastuder :
Thoughts welcome!