Observing & Identifying Wildlife - wiki

Nature Talk
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[Please feel free to expand! I’d like this to stay a top level guide to guides – it might make sense to break out subordinate clades with their own wikis, if this gets unwieldy. I welcome any help! Note that because this is a wiki, it can still be edited despite comments being closed.]

General Advice

Microorganisms

Various guides to taxa:

Plants

How to Photograph Plants - https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/presentation-how-to-photograph-plants-and-more-by-lena-struwe-and-peter-nitzsche/15143

Various guides to taxa:

Vascular plants (Tracheophyta) : Kew’s Plants of the World Online (POWO) = the external taxonomic authority

Hard cases:

Ocean drift seeds:

Regional Plant Guides

North America

Fungi

How to photograph fungi:

  • Photo from above, side, and especially underside of cap if present. Photo in context & note substrate / nearby plants. Bonus: Spore prints, bruising, microscopy, genes.
  • [vid] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKF_pIY0Zpc1

Various guides to taxa:

Animals

Invertebrates

Arthropods

  • North America: BugGuide predates and is similar to iNaturalist in that members submit photographs for identification, but curated and limited to North American arthropods.

Spiders

Insects

Onychophora

Fish

Amphibians & Reptiles

Birds

Mammals

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Seems to be working.

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I haven’t updated this in a while, but on my blog I have a page for wildlife and plant ID resources:

https://writingfornature.wordpress.com/links-to-interesting-blogs/what-animal-was-that/

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Yes! You really do have some great links, and the blog posts are very well-written. You have some wonderful, unusual topics. I particularly liked the posting about the Ba Cat Island langurs. :relaxed: Thank you for sharing that.

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I really need to do some new posts, but work here with the langurs just doesn’t leave me with enough free time where I have the energy to put into writing more posts.

I feel kind of bad about not uploading more and adding to the lists of ID, GIS, etc resources.

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This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

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Hello! I wanted to share this general iNaturalist photo guide that just got released yesterday as part of the BC Parks iNaturalist Project!

http://johnreynolds.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iNaturalist-Photo-Guide.pdf

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MEDITERRANEAN - marine ID books
GERMANY, AUSTRIA - plant ID books

check out my iNat profile:
https://www.inaturalist.org/people/4565033

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I got a 404 error when I tried the link to the photo guide, but I could try again later.

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Oh, thank you for letting me know! I’ll let John know. But in the meantime, the link from the BC iNaturalist project website works. Here it is :D https://www.bcinat.com/_files/ugd/f82a97_911b2967870f4e4e9d97472f547d1a41.pdf

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Thanks! I swapped in your working URL for the one on the wiki. (Since it is a wiki, y’all are welcome to edit it directly to make improvements!)

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This post is inspired by the journal entry Documenting Mushrooms · iNaturalist, which @nikibifrost often links in comments on mushrooms. It is a guide to what to include in a photograph to make a mushroom observation identifiable.

Well, mushrooms are not the only taxa with problems. Think of that one genus or higher that you know well, that you are constantly bumping back from species-level identifications. Wouldn’t it be nice if more of the people observing it knew how to take an identifiable photo?

Take Lumbricidae. People seem to default to calling them all Lumbricus terrestris, and taxon experts are seldom able to do more than bump them back to family. Now, maybe getting to species takes dissection or microscopy; but what about genus or some other level between family and species? Are there features which, if people knew to include them, would let you get to one of those levels?

We can’t currently search journal posts the way we can search Forum posts, so I had to wait to start this thread until I came upon an observation with Niki’s link to the journal post. But maybe this thread can be a start on collating some of this type of material if it is out there. Have you come across journal posts that explain how to take identifiable photos of taxa that are usually unidentifiable?

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I moved this post to the Nature Talk area because that seems to be where similar threads are found and I figured it might help others find this thread if it was in the same place. I also created and added a “resources” tag since that seems to be a keyword in these types of threads. Here are some examples of other threads on specific taxa that might be of interest:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/laymans-guide-to-fungus-orders-families/46181
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/resources-for-identifying-fungi/38332
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-should-i-look-for-in-grasshoppers/46469
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/favorite-resources/41194
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/european-bivalve-and-mollusc-id-resources/39455
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ant-identification-resources-europe/36782
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/resources-to-identify-remains-in-bird-pellets-regurgitations/37058

Some of them include links to iNat journal posts, but many are resources that are off iNat as well. There are probably others that could be added to that list/this thread.

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For any fellow S’Africans here, I find this to be a very useful catalog of well-structured and detailed ID Keys for many of our local insect taxa, even if most of them are from the early 1900’s and some information may be dated:

https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/

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Would be a very useful wiki if there could be something edittable by everyone!
But could also get a bit out of hand maybe… where do you stop with families, different regions, etc… ? Or are you just asking specifically for journal posts?

If this hasn’t already formed a post…at least presumably someone has already compiled many links already and can provide a good starting point. …but here are a few to throw in the mix regardless :

Worms :
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/research-centres-and-groups/opal/SOIL-4pp-chart.pdf

Spiders :
https://araneae.nmbe.ch/biodiversity/countrylist

Beetles :
https://www.coleoptera.org.uk/curculionoidea/weevil-identification-guides

Flies:
Diptera.info
UK (and many European) Hoverflies

I could add so many more.
I have a lot of bookmarks as I am sure we all do.
But I will stop here haha… I think this would be great if it was a wiki that could be properly formed and contributed to though.

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Good idea on the wiki (and suggestions from others as well). There is an existing wiki thread that this fits well with, and resources can be added to - quite an impressive collection, so I’ve merged this thread/posts here - add away!

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PoWO is amazing!

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