I noted this statement in the guidelines: “The iNat Forum is also not a place to seek help with identification”. However, I often use iNat to identify plants, especially natives versus invasive and noxious weeds. I have 20 acres bordering on Roosevelt National Forest and the Larimer County Colorado Blue Mountain Conservation easement area. My property and nearby land is heavily infested with non-native noxious weeds, and I’m trying to restore it to native plants.
It would be very helpful to have more pictures of young shoots and sprouts (both natives and invasive weeds) so that I can identify and remove the weeds. There are Colorado native plant groups on facebook, but FB is not well suited for creating an archive of pictures that people can easily search. Is this something that we can do on iNatForum? I’m thinking of a discussion topic that includes photos of shoots and sprouts that people can add to. It would also be helpful to have a discussion topic for people trying to restore degraded lands (e.g., topics specific to different states or ecosystems).
If these are not a good topics for iNatForum, are there other good resources for this? In any case, it would be helpful to have more pictures of sprouts and young plants on iNat, not just the mature, flowering plants.
Thanks, Lucy! And would it be okay to post pictures of young plants here? Or should I only post them on iNaturalist? What I’m really looking for is an catalogue or archive of young plant pictures that I can use to identify my weeds versus native sprouts.
What you’re trying to do is very useful. As others have said, the photos themselves should be added as iNat observations, but the Forum is certainly the right place to go about it.
Make more observations of sprouts and young plants whose IDs you know and add them to iNat. One of the big challenges of identifying these plants is that the diagnostic characters for a lot of genera and species depend on seeing flowers or fruit. If you know the identity of a plant, say because you’ve seen it in the area the previous year, then adding it to iNat with that ID starts to fill that gap.
Also add observations of sprouts and young plants you can’t ID precisely, and follow their development until you can ID them. You might add the first observation or a young sprout as “Dicot”, and then add a second one of the same plant a couple months later that you can ID as “Japanese knotweed”. The go back to the sprout observation, update the ID and add a comment linking it to the identifiable follow-up observation (so people know your justification). There are also observation fields like “Associated observation” that you can use for this purpose.
As your knowledge grows, find existing observations of these young plants by other people and add IDs to the extent of your knowledge.
Update the taxon photos for the species concerned to include a representative photo of an early sprout and another of a young plant. iNat allows up to 12 taxon photos, and because of the change to how it displays these, the sprout and young plant photos should be fine if they come towards the end of the list.
Encourage other iNat users to do steps 1–4 as well.
Maybe create an iNat project to coordinate everyone involved in this work.
How will this actually work?
Including more photos of shoots and young plants with accurate IDs will increase the probability that these become part of the training set for iNat’s computer vision model, which means that future versions of the CV model should do a better job of identifying new observations of these young plants. Because CV recommendations also incorporate a geomodel, suggestions should favor species that are expected in your area over similar-looking ones that grow elsewhere. However, we should expect that CV will be somewhat limited by the same factors that make it hard for people to distinguish different plants in these early growth stages.
Adding photos of shoots and young plants to the preferred taxon images means that when you ask CV to suggest possible IDs for a shoot or young plants, the first image it returns will usually be of a shoot or young plant. That should make it easier to figure out which of the options seems the best match. The second photo would then be the primary taxon photo—e.g. a flower—which could help validate the ID based on the observer recognizing what the species looks like later in the year.
Many plants have juvenile leaves vs the mature ones.
That would be a useful new annotation.
(We got ‘coloured leaves’ for Northern deciduous) Otherwise we wait.
Many seedlings, especially ones with only a few leaves, are difficult to impossible to ID to species with confidence. They may be identifiable to genus or family, but closely related species might need fruit or flowers to identify. One way you could help would be to take photos of small seedlings on your property, then follow that plant to maturity, and go back and add an ID to your original seedling with a link to the mature plant. That will allow the seedlings to be made research grade observations.
As an aside, the best way to restore land is to try to kill off exotics and let the natives that are already there come back. The worst thing you can do in my opinion is plant seeds from commercial producers of native seed. Plants have tremendous amounts of geographic variation and there are “species” that are actually complexes of undescribed ones. Sometimes native nurseries have misidentified plants. Buying seeds is a pretty good way of introducing varieties or even species that don’t really belong there. If you want to introduce from seed, it’s best to collect them from close proximity to the property.
spiphany has some good suggestions here, but says they aren’t for Colorado, but you can narrow them Colorado, or potentially for areas more relevant to you than the whole state by clicking on the number of observations of the group in that project, then under “Filters”, and “Place” enter “Colorado” or your your more specifically relevant area than the whole state. Some of these projects are already narrowed to an area that doesn’t include Colorado, so it won’t work for these.
An additional suggestion:
You can narrow your searches to given months. By narrowing the searches down to the months that your target species are sprouting / shooting you will find more images of them sprouting / shooting.
I have been collecting some seeds from my property but I’m also buying seeds in bulk from Western Native Seeds. The seeds are all for plants that are native to Colorado, although some of their seeds are collected in nearby states. I did not have much success with any of the seeds I winter sowed a year ago, perhaps because of the large seed bank in the soil of the non-native weeds.
Redstem filaree is the most problematic - I’ve been weeding the same areas for three years, and every week I can find a fresh crop filaree shoots. It would be great to hear advice from others who are trying to restore acreage. I can start a new thread on restoring degraded acreage if their is interest in this topic.
If you have a seed bank of non-native weeds - maybe start with a locally indigenous pioneer sp - which can crowd out the unwanted plants. Then will politely retreat when it has made space for better choices.
In a different context, yellow rattle is used to stifle grass, so the wildflowers can come thru.
