Is anybody able to get the “similar species” to load on the T. officinale taxon page? It’s never worked for me (at least at the United States level - every once in a while a state will load). It works for every other species I think to try, at every geographic level, basically instantly. Thought I’d ask if it’s just me before I submit a bug report or poke around to see if this is some sort of known issue.
Didn’t load for me either
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This might indicate (I don’t know for sure) that the Similar Species tab is dynamically populated from existing observations whenever someone clicks on it. It may be choking on the number of observations…
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Yeah, actually my first thought was Gerald :-) (Warning to anybody inclined to click the link - he might take a bit to fully load)! I do suspect the similar species are dynamically populated, but I tried a lot of other species with even more observations than T. officinale, and “similar species” are working in those, so I don’t know what the deal is. We’ve been moving a lot of dandelion observations around recently, so maybe that has something to do with it. I’ve also let it sit for a while, to see if they eventually show up, but it never resolves itself.
For anybody working some more difficult dandelion IDs, and worried like me about messing up, I’ve just used the “similar species” for T. erythrospermum instead - surely they’re the same. I’ll submit a bug report!
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Similar species for T. erythrospermum is not loading for me either, nor is genus taraxacum. It is loading the similar species for other super observose species like Mallards, yarrow, and clover. Maybe something has triggered it to re-index all of taraxacum, or an ancestor, at once? That’s my best guess or it could be some actual bug.
I can get them all to work if I narrow the location to county. However, choosing larger locations like state results in failure to load anything.
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Cross-reference to bug report here. Might be best to post related comments there instead of here.
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Speciation has always, more or less, compensated species loss. Otherwise now the world should be poor or void of species.
I think that they are mostly unaware of, but note that species are described, not created.
Of course it is a real issue. We should not made an equation that a “gained” species necessarily compensates an extinct species.
The moderator correctly pointed out that this thread is outside the topic at hand. If you’d like to move your response to a different thread, I’d be willing to continue the conversation. Also willing to let it drop and continue lumping dandelions together at genus level.
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Now up to 1,664. Still no angry villagers. Some positive feedback. See here, here, and here
Also came across another really cool fasciation obs.
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Hey everybody! It’s been almost exactly a week since I first posted, so… time for an update! Here are the current numbers (compared to when I first posted):
United States Verifiable Dandelions: 132,851 (+936)
Total Research Grade: 58,165 (+5,713)
RG, Common Dandelion: 44,416 (-142)
RG, Red-seeded Dandelion: 1,557 (-2)
RG, Genus Taraxacum: 12,011 (+5,875)
RG, Section Taraxacum: 102 (-19)
RG, Other: (still whatever the math says)
Total Needs ID: 74,687 (-4,776)
Needs ID, Common Dandelion: 25,062 (-409)
Needs ID, Red-seeded Dandelion: 5,985 (+18)
Needs ID, Genus Taraxacum: 40,963 (-4,381)
Needs ID, Section Taraxacum: 2,354 (-6)
Needs ID, Other: (still whatever the math says)
Some thoughts: (1) Nearly 1,000 United States dandelion observations were posted in a week! Wow - I know this site’s been growing, and I know it’s the peak time of year for dandelions, but - wow! (2) We’ve made a lot of progress! The first three days after my post, we had reduced the backlog of “Needs ID” at a rate of 525/day - now across seven days, we’ve reduced it at a rate of 682/day. Quite impressive, especially considering the number of new observations - although still quite a ways to go!
Here’s a pleasant two-year-old observation from Maine I saw:
Hey, who are we to judge what they bring along to eat on their picnic? 
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I really appreciate the effort comrade has gone through for this post/brigade. I posted a vaguely related topic recently and was asking whether there exists a list of species that needed to be reviewed, so I’m happy youve provided one and the method for almost anyone to help out.
I did a little bit of work in my unpopulated region, still need to go through again and mark “as good as can be.” Although it seems here we have a greater number of dandelion species, several of which are more easily identifiable
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When I find one identified to Taraxacum officinale, I add an ID as Taraxacum (with a little explanation) and click “No, it can’t be improved.” This makes it RG as T. officinale. I think this is better than making a disagreeing ID of Taraxacum, which would require at least a second Taraxacum ID to get it to RG and out of the Needs ID pile. What’s your opinion, though?
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This isn’t true. If you add a disagreeing ID, the observation taxon moves back to Taraxacum (and the community taxon becomes the same). If you then click “can’t be improved” the observation becomes research grade because there are already two agreeing IDs at the genus level.
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i think she is saying she does the green ‘not disagreeing’ ID. This is what i would do as well.
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Ah dandelions, the child’s rose!
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I personally prefer, at least for my own observations, for it to be a disagreeing ID at genus level. I think it can’t be confirmed for the most part that dandelions (in US) are the species “common dandelion” because we don’t even really know what that label entails currently. I haven’t gone out and identified other people’s US dandelion observations but if I did, I’d have a bit of a moral conundrum. I think some people would prefer to wait to see the taxonomy work itself out and leave their observations at species level for aesthetic purposes or just general preference. That bothers me a little (or a lot) because I see it as incorrect. I don’t want to force other people to have that approach if they don’t have that same preference, even if I think the opposing preference is or at least feels technically incorrect.
So, in short, I think the disagreeing ID that bumps it back to genus is most proper, but I don’t want to force that onto anybody.
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Yes, I understand that. But it is still incorrect to say a disagreeing ID requires a second ID at the higher level for the observation to reach RG. A fine-scale ID already counts as an agreeing ID at each higher taxon.
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I feel the same way, but it’s probably amplified because I have no training in any relevant field… so who am I to force rg onto one that someone thinks is officinale. several people have confirmed the genus id after i post the verbiage… but more have not (mostly, I think, because they aren’t active on inat).
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I don’t have any qualifications or anything either, other than a lot of personal experience with being up close and around dandelions… I guess I could just reference this forum post if I needed to defend my decision to push something back to genus, though. I really do think that’s the best that can be done on the site at the time and it would probably be helpful if I went through some. Maybe I will.